Why are we missing the Face News War?

Addressing the problem of false news was to be an easy mission. France seeks the adoption of new laws, which would allow courts to decide on the accuracy of online reporting ahead of national elections. The United States proposed a law on increased transparency on those buying political advertising in social media.

And the European Commission will pass its dezinformation practice code later this month, aimed at preventing digital lies ahead of next year's early parliamentary elections. But as voters, from Bavaria to Georgia, go to the polls, politicians' efforts in this direction are facing an unpleasant reality:

”Traders” news news news news reports are a step forward, thanks to techniques allowing them to hide their whereabouts, disguise themselves as local activists, and buy political advertising in their countries' local currency, to avoid regulations against foreign influence.

New tricks, which also include a change in photo-based dezinformation, and the use of Internet message services such as Huhatsapp, are designed to overcome our outdated definition of what constitutes a fake news purchased abroad, easily identifiable and false.

Most of this failure is how politicians are coping. Lawmakers in Europe, the United States and other countries have focused on the development of war -- one born from the 2016 presidential election -- where Russia-backed groups bought social media ads (softly in ruble), to plant doubts in the minds of Western voters, promoted posts in Titeter and Facebook groups, with a badly written English, to polarise political debate.

“On policy level, conversations people had occurred in 2016”- says Claire Ward, executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit organization that fights deinformation worldwide based on the John F Government School. Kennedy at Harvard University. “The challenge is that politicians, they have no knowledge of how these” platforms work -- she adds.

This, on the other hand, does not mean that global efforts against disinformation have been a total waste of time. Gone are the times when Mark Zuckerberg mocked the idea that the lies spreading virally to his social network influenced voters in the American presidential election of 2016.

After an existential crisis and the anger of investors, technology companies like Facebook finally realized that they were part of the problem, driving out digital frauds trying to buy advertising to spread misinformation, and eliminating hundreds of thousands of accounts in state-sponsored social media, and promoting polarizing political messages.

Ordinary voters still find it difficult to identify when facing a dezinformation. But with the term “fake below”, which is now part of our daily vocabulary, there is at least an increased awareness that not everything that people read and see on the Internet, should be taken for granted.

Yet, dealing with mismanagement remains a work in progress. For example, 4 of the 5 Titter accounts that spread disinformation during the 2016 elections in the United States still remain active, according to a recent study by academics at George Washington University.

Much of the Facebook digital universe - still the largest platform for false news - still remains available to users, despite the company's promises to open the third parties' data sources that track mismanagement.

Amid the global noise for technology companies to do more, these private companies are taking on more responsibility to control online discussions -- a job that usually belongs to public regulators. The fact that the platforms should already act as almost-reformers of truth, put them in a confrontational course with politicians, using routine platforms to share their unilateral content, thus leading to accusations, that the Big Tech is restricting legal policy.

Marija Gabriel, Europe's digital commissioner, will promote the new European Union code against dezinformation on 16 October. It is a series of non-binding guidelines that encourage companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to increase transparency for online political advertising, and reduce the number of false accounts in social networks.

The code was drafted in close consultation with technology companies themselves. However, a group set up to monitor the work "compliance" composed among other media companies denounced the EU's response to the false news, arguing, among other things, that it contains “compliance and has no concrete implementation tools, so there is no possibility to monitor the implementation process”.

Despite the criticism, other countries from Brazil and India are considering implementing similar code of behavior for Big Tech. But they are not in step with the tactics of a new generation of digital frauds, and state-sponsored subjects.

Where groups once distributed false messages on social networks, computers that could be identified as located in Russia, individuals now usually mask their activities, claiming to be found in the United States or parts of Europe. They also buy political ads through domestic currencies, rather than rubles, according to researchers who track internet dezinations.

This makes it almost impossible to determine who's real, and who's not in this online game of fake news, even when technology companies engage the teams of sophisticated engineers and artificial intelligence in addressing this problem, cleaning up bad actors.

“Tactics have changed”- says Ben Nimo, associate in the Legal Research Laboratory in think tank justly Council, which monitors cyber-designation campaigns. People “are trying very hard to cover their traces”.

The war has also shifted from words to images, a trend that only a few legislative proposals have mentioned. Part of this change is practical. For non-country speakers seeking to spread dezinforms during another country's elections, a reproduced viral ʹmememele can more easily avoid detection, compared to a badly translated Facebook post.

The advantage? Such deposits remain difficult to censor or regulate because the same picture can be used for satire or false news. Increasing message services on the Internet such as Huhatsapp é almost impossible to regulate because of high levels of encryption in developing countries like India, have gone hand in hand with a new generation of mismanagement, which can be widely divided among groups of thousands of users.

This is “the state of false news” as we arrive at the end of 2018, a world different from 2 years ago. To fight this threat, politicians must update their tactics, or fall back in this battle.

Source: “Politico.eu”