Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust
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HOUSE OF LORDS Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies Report of Session 2019–21 Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust Ordered to be printed 16 June 2020 and published 29 June 2020 Published by the Authority of the House of Lords HL Paper 77 Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies The Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies was appointed by the House of Lords on 13 June 2019, and re-appointed on 22 October 2019 and 22 January 2020 “to consider democracy and digital technologies”. Membership The Members of the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies were: Lord Black of Brentwood Lord Lipsey Lord Dobbs (resigned 15 July 2019) Lord Lucas Lord German Baroness McGregor-Smith (joined 15 July 2019) Lord Harris of Haringey Lord Mitchell Lord Holmes of Richmond Baroness Morris of Yardley Baroness Kidron Lord Puttnam (Chair) Lord Knight of Weymouth Lord Scriven Declaration of interests See Appendix 1. A full list of Members’ interests can be found in the Register of Lords’ Interests: http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/standards-and-interests/register-of-lords- interests Publications All publications of the Committee are available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/407/democracy-and-digital-technologies- committee/ Parliament Live Live coverage of debates and public sessions of the Committee’s meetings are available at: http://www.parliamentlive.tv Further information Further information about the House of Lords and its Committees, including guidance to witnesses, details of current inquiries and forthcoming meetings is available at: http://www.parliament.uk/business/lords Committee staff The staff who worked on this Committee were Olivia Crabtree (Clerk), Tim Stacey (Policy Analyst) and Robert Cocks (Committee Assistant). Contact details All correspondence should be addressed to the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies, Committee Office, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW. Telephone 020 7219 8829. Email [email protected] Twitter You can follow the Committee on Twitter: @HLDemoDigital. CONTENTS Page Foreword by the Chair 4 Summary 6 Chapter 1: Introduction 9 Box 1: Definition of platforms 10 Figure 1: Examples of daily activity across social media platforms globally 11 The Committee’s work and acknowledgements 14 Chapter 2: Informed Citizens 16 Box 2: Definition of misinformation and disinformation 16 Misinformation and the media 17 Political advertising 19 Tackling misinformation and disinformation online 21 The role of fact checkers 23 Promoting good information 28 Communicating statistics 28 Making use of parliamentary expertise 29 Public interest journalism 30 Chapter 3: Accountability 33 Accountability and the technology platforms 33 The Online Harms agenda 35 Figure 2: Timeline of progress on the Online Harms White Paper 36 Freedom of expression in the online world 38 Platforms’ ultimate responsibility under a duty of care 39 Content moderation oversight 42 Appealing platforms’ decisions 44 Parliamentary oversight 47 Regulatory capacity 48 Box 3: The Regulators 49 Chapter 4: Transparency 54 Do platforms cause polarisation and degrade democratic discourse? 55 Targeted advertising 55 Foreign interference 57 Filter bubbles 58 Algorithmic design and outrage factories 59 Access for independent researchers 60 Algorithmic transparency 63 Box 4: How Google’s algorithms work 64 Algorithmic bias 65 Transparency in content moderation 68 Box 5: President Trump and content moderation study 70 Chapter 5: Inclusive debate across society 74 The role of technology in tackling the challenges facing democracy 74 Supporting technological innovation in democracy 74 Online voting 77 Technology as a tool, but not a panacea for problems facing democracy 78 A democratic information hub 82 How Government and Parliament could better use digital tools 83 Chapter 6: Free and fair elections 85 Box 6: Definition of campaigner 86 Electoral law 86 Figure 3: Reported spending by campaigners on digital advertising as a percentage of total advertising spend 87 Figure 4: Timeline of electoral developments throughout modern British history 87 Devolution 88 Imprints 89 Box 7: Imprints 89 Electoral Commission powers 92 Outside the formal investigation period 92 Campaigners’ receipts 93 Sanctions 94 Oversight powers 95 Small donations and spending 97 Advert databases 98 Box 8: Mozilla Guidelines for Effective Advert Archives 100 Campaigners’ use of personal data 102 Chapter 7: Active digital citizens 107 Political literacy 107 Digital skills and digital media literacy 107 Box 9: Definition of digital media literacy 108 Table 1: Digital Media Literacy and Digital Skills in the Curriculum 109 Lessons from abroad 111 Table 2: Digital pedagogy in Estonia and Finland 112 Who has responsibility for digital media literacy? 114 Teaching digital media literacy 117 Box 10: JCQ Statistics on take-up of computing GCSE and A-level 119 Making social media companies understandable to the public 119 Anonymity as a barrier to understanding content on the internet 122 Summary of recommendations 125 Appendix 1: List of Members and declarations of interest 131 Appendix 2: List of witnesses 133 Appendix 3: Call for evidence 142 Appendix 4: Note of the Committee Digital Surgeries organised with The Politics Project 144 Appendix 5: Regulatory Innovation Workshop 146 Appendix 6: The Seven Principles of Public Life (The Nolan Principles) 148 Appendix 7: List of definitions used in this Report 149 Appendix 8: Glossary 151 Evidence is published online at https://committees.parliament.uk/ committee/407/democracy-and-digital-technologies-committee/ and available for inspection at the Parliamentary Archives (020 7129 3074). Q in footnotes refers to a question in oral evidence. The prefixes ZDA and DAD refer to items of written evidence. The prefixes are interchangeable and the same evidence will be found under each number in both series. 4 Digital TechNology AND the ResurrectioN of Trust FOREWORD BY THE CHAIR Our Committee is delivering this Report to Parliament in the middle of an unprecedented health and consequential economic crisis. But our Report focuses on a different form of crisis, one with roots that extend far deeper, and are likely to last far longer than COVID-19. This is a virus that affects all of us in the UK - a pandemic of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. If allowed to flourish these counterfeit truths will result in the collapse of public trust, and without trust democracy as we know it will simply decline into irrelevance. The situation is that serious. In the digital world, our belief in what we see, hear and read is being distorted to the point at which we no longer know who or what to trust. The prospects for building a harmonious and sustainable society on that basis are, to all intents and purposes, non-existent. Our Report addresses a number of concerns, including the urgent case for reform of electoral law and our overwhelming need to become a digitally literate society. We must all become better equipped to understand the means by which we can be exploited, and the motives of those doing so. Misinformation can pervert common sense to the point at which it is easy to forget the fragile foundations upon which so many of our freedoms are built - until they become threatened. With so many of those freedoms curtailed in lockdown it seems possible that as we regain them, we may wish to contribute more fully towards reimagining and reshaping our future. In our Report we make forty-five recommendations which, taken together, we believe could serve as a useful response to a whole series of concerns. We urge the Government to implement them. Our Committee met against a backdrop of troubling realities; the first being the power that has been ceded to a few unelected and unaccountable digital corporations; companies which between them control the flow of information that has such a profound influence on our daily lives. The second is an increasing abandonment of the seven Principles of Public Life adopted by a Parliament in crisis just twenty-five years ago. As a Committee we have tested our recommendations against these principles in the hope that those holding positions of power and influence in the public and private sectors might similarly respond. Trust, be it in Government, the media, the giant digital platforms, or civil society generally, must be resurrected, and then reinforced every day. I will forever be grateful to the Committee who, along with our extraordinarily committed officials, remained undistracted by a seemingly endless stream of breaking stories, each of which threatened at times to derail our considerations - from the proroguing of Parliament to the public arguments between the President of the United States and social media platforms. Digital TechNology AND the ResurrectioN of Trust 5 The unanimous views of our Committee were recently summed up by Shoshana Zuboff, author of the 2018 book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’: “It’s down to lawmakers to protect democracy in an age of surveillance, whether it’s market driven or authoritarian driven. The sleeping giant of democracy is finally stirring, lawmakers are waking up, but they need to feel the public at their backs. We need a web that will offer the vision of a digital future that is compatible with democracy. That is the work of the next decade.”1 We sincerely hope our Report will be a useful contribution to what is clearly an urgent epoch-shaping debate. Lord Puttnam Chair of the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies 1 ‘Inside China’s controversial mission to reinvent the internet’ Financial Times (27 March 2020): https:// www.ft.com/content/ba94c2bc-6e27-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f [accessed 8 June 2020] 6 Digital TechNology AND the ResurrectioN of Trust SUMMARY Democracy faces a daunting new challenge. The age where electoral activity was conducted through traditional print media, canvassing and door knocking, is rapidly vanishing. Instead it is dominated by digital and social media. They are now the source from which voters get most of their information and political messaging.