It’s difficult to decide whether one should be amused or appalled at the fact that disinformation has now evolved from being a conscious attempt to persuade people of a lie, to a form of self-harming that is partly a result of the snowballing effect of constantly undermining belief in truth.
I say partly because, of course, one can never rule out stupidity as a cause.
Take the recent example of Jacob Zuma’s new money-laundering initiative, the bravely named uMkhonto Wesizwe party.
If you’re a party that is contesting the upcoming elections, you have to register 15,000 members and supporters with the IEC, and importantly, they also all have to be registered voters.
The MK party’s founder, Comrade Jabulani Sibongiseni Khumalo, apparently believed that an official IEC document requiring the signatures of party members to endorse names for provincial legislatures was a nefarious attempt by spies to discover top-secret information.
Quite why Cde Khumalo would think that the names of your supporters should be private, I’m not sure. Feel free to leave your guesses in the comments section.
But in a display of either paranoia or hypersensitivity to phishing campaigns, Cde Khumalo is quoted on News24 as having told MK supporters that “if anyone from MK Party has signed copies then they must tear them and throw them away as Appendix 11 is a fraudulent document resultant of an infiltration of MK party.”
It’s a classic case of shooting yourself in the foot that’s in your mouth.
As you can imagine, the party is now running around desperately trying to get the required signatures.
The story quotes an MK party official as warning members that not signing the document could cause the party to “lose the elections at provincial level in all provinces”.
“Do not destroy or throw the forms away comrades,” he is quoted as saying. “They are important, without the Appendix 11 form, the party will collapse.”
The notion of truth
What the story does do, though, is illustrate how fungible the impacts of disinformation can be.
It’s become a truism of disinformation that it’s not that important whether people believe the lies. What is important is that they start to disbelieve in the notion of truth.
Did a woman really give birth to 10 babies? Not important! What’s important is that the famous misinfo-midwife and quack doctor to the media, Iqbal Survé, can stoke a climate of mistrust in legitimate media in an attempt to make people doubt the truth of investigations into his business shenanigans and foreign-state-captured media properties.
Estimates are that over four billion people, more than half of the world’s population across more than 40 countries, are going to vote in elections in 2024, according to the University of Melbourne’s School of Government (via The Conversation).
This means that we are going to be inundated by stories about the threats of disinformation and AI-generated deep fakes.
By the time our Year of Living Democratically is over, we’re going to be suffering the same fatigue we did with the cryptocurrency years when every second story was about the threats and opportunities of bitcoin.
Nobody ever really quite understood what bitcoin is, which didn’t help ordinary readers (of which I count myself one) to formulate a response to it. We should aim to be more precise about how we talk about what I’ve glibly been referring to as disinformation.
Fighting disinformation
The DISARM Foundation has created an open-source framework for people to use to fight disinformation by sharing data and analysis and to coordinate effective action.
They say that the DISARM framework has been developed drawing on global cybersecurity best practices, and “is used to help communicators, from whichever discipline or sector, to gain a clear shared understanding of disinformation incidents and to immediately identify defensive and mitigation actions available to them”.
The DISARM vision is essentially one where collaboration, and the sharing of a single, open-source framework, is at the heart of successfully combating disinformation.
Basically, if we aren’t all talking in a shared language, we’re not going to be able to grapple effectively with the bad actors in our ecosystems.
“In doing this,” DISARM perhaps optimistically claims, “humanity will be better protected against the threats and harms posed by bad faith actors in the hopeful but troublesome digital age of this 21st century.”
What’s going to be important to you, assuming you’re an active supporter of democracies and other forms of open societies, is a more nuanced understanding of the types of disinformation with which we’re going to struggle.
The DISARM framework, for example, “supports wider harms, beyond disinformation, and encompasses concepts such as ‘IO’ (influence operations), ‘IMI’ (information manipulation and interference), ‘FIMI’ (focusing on foreign ‘IMI’), ‘MDM’ (mis/dis/mal-information, ‘information disorder’, among other terms and spheres.”
So the next time I have occasion to write about the blatant Chinese propaganda planted in Independent Media’s publications, I’ll be calling it FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference), rather than just plain old disinformation.
In some instances, it’s going to be a case of, “You say potato, I say 10 imaginary babies.” One person’s truth will become another person’s disinformation, as with the MK party’s reaction to the IEC’s Appendix 11 document.
DISARM’s definition of disinformation is “the deliberate attempt to influence perception and decision-making by presenting information that is incomplete, incorrect or out of context”, which still leaves some loopholes.
For example, when does satire become disinformation?
The Dofness
I’m thinking of a recent tweet by a musician and sit-down comedian who goes by the moniker The Kiffness.
He tweeted, “We need to pass a test to get our licence to drive. This is proof that we need to pass a test for our licence to vote.” Now this could be satire, albeit incredibly bad satire. Or it could be simple stupidity. It might even be the first part of a marketing campaign to rebrand himself The Dofness, which I think we all agree we could get behind.
The conflation of driving a car with being an active citizen of a country is of course silly. The idea that we should have different classes of citizens and that some people count more than others, is downright fascist.
And the implication that some South Africans vote a certain way because they lack the intellectual tools to make the correct decision is the crudest form of projection, sadly shared by some opposition politicians.
But is this disinformation, misinformation or some other sub-categorisation of idiocy? It probably doesn’t matter.
What does matter is when people start sharing it as part of anti-democratic, populist rhetoric, and it becomes weaponised as part of a miasma of poorly conceived hot takes.
The consequence of this proliferation of piffle is that we end up in a place where we are less able to judge what makes sense and what doesn’t, in the same way that the MK party founder is unable to gauge what a genuine IEC requirement is and what a piece of malevolent disinformation is.
This is going to get even worse as deep fakes generated by AI start to proliferate, although we are also going to see many pro-democracy benefits coming out of AI as well.
But as usual, the last line of defence against propaganda, both sophisticated and crude, is going to be plain old human common sense. And we’re going to need to start stockpiling if we hope to avoid the self-harming tropes of disinformation. DM
Become an Insider
As they say, common sense is not so common. As the author states, I may be projecting here, but to say that voters cannot make poor decisions because of a lack of intellectual tools is incorrect. Anyone can make poor decisions, but it is significantly more likely given a lack of education, the development of critical thinking skills. A general reason for this is that critical thinking and education reduce certain biases, especially biases driven by emotional states, which are subject to manipulation by propaganda, populism, and certain forms of disinformation. Rationality, and the ability to hold opposing positions, must be trained in all of us. These are intellectual tools that must be learnt and developed; The development of which will improve decision making and making realistic, and correct judgements.
Excellent comment and I hope the author of this Opinionista takes the time to answer this comment seriously and without accusations.
many people get educated into having no critical thinking. education has repeatedly shown in the past to be an excellent way to mould the truth into whatever shape the educators desire it to be.
Well perhaps, but don’t ignore the fact that certain forms of critical thinking and education can themselves create quite astounding biases. Many of the comments on this platform – on which I suspect everyone will claim a certain level of education and critical skills – bear this out repeatedly in relation to whatever topic is under discussion. So basically it seems that we are all asking for everyone to subscribe to a particular kind of education and a particular critical orientation which matches our own. Hmmm, not really a starter is it :)? This ‘democracy’ business is very messy, and of course, as some of you know, we are not even halfway through the stalled democracy project which some brave people started way back in the 19th (even 18th) century – sadly we still have a very long way to go, as attested by perhaps 80% of the comments at any time.
“The conflation of driving a car with being an active citizen of a country is of course silly. The idea that we should have different classes of citizens and that some people count more than others, is downright fascist”. That might be so Chris, but you can’t tell people off for becoming frustrated or cynical when the critically important decision of choosing who leads this broken country out of its current quagmire is “fungible” (which turns out to be legalese for “exchangeable”, I had to interrupt my reading to look it up) for for a KFC meal, a T-shirt and a cap. What’s the point of launching an influence operation against a target audience, many of who can’t read for meaning (that’s not piffle by the way, that’s fact), but are able to mark a ballot paper?
A possible solution to the problem of voters who don’t have the education to be able to decide on the complex task of who to elect for President, would be to have a tiered system of government – rather like the Swiss Canton system. Everybody still gets to vote (without a license) but only at Ward level. All the elected Ward Chairs, then vote to elect (from among themselves) their District Chair. All the District Chairs then vote their Provincial Chair and all the Provincial Chairs elect the President. Perhaps independently of that, the Farmers could elect the Minister of Agriculture, Teachers the Minister of Education, Doctors and Nurses the Minister of Health etc. Too late to adopt such an idea for any of the 2024 elections happening worldwide, but worth studying the Swiss Canton System (which is similarly tiered) to see how it might be applied to the next election. It will need a MASSIVE People Power driven campaign to get it adopted and written into the constitution because the politicians won’t give up their power without a fight. Good sense is not common, and we are more stupidiens than sapiens, but almost all voters can see which politician is offering a genuine solution to problems at ward level. At each tier, it should not take long to discern who is capable of getting things done, and so who is worth electing to the higher tier. LOTS of details to sort out, but with so much at stake, worth putting in the effort. Bruce Danckwerts, CHOMA, Zambia
Perhaps a Federal style of government is more applicable to us here in RSA
Well that wouldn’t necessarily save us, even in the Western Cape because the problem with democracy is that if there enough lunatics they end up running the institution. For example, if there are enough gangsters the Gangster Party can be the governnent and if there enough idiots the ANC can be the government. You only need to look at the US for another live example of that phenomenon.
Here in the USA we have a perfect example of how not to choose administration officials. Their only commonality is incompetence.
Common Sense should be a compulsory school leaving subject.
It is staggering how few “clever” and “professional” “successful” citizens have ever pondered their way to a self-formulated original opinion.