Social media makes politics more emotional

The European Peoples Party experts group met today to discuss the important question of #fakenews and their role in today's politics.

As professor Miguel Poiares Maduro form Florence University rightly noticed, #fakenews is nothing new. It is the impact of the fake news, its sheer scale, that is new.

The digital revolution that we are experiencing pushed politics in emotional sphere. We do not have 24 hours news cycle anymore. Its 24 seconds now. It is a well-established and well known behavioural fact: the quicker we react, the less rational we are. Social media has eliminated intermediaries, allowing us to reflect, to pause, so we all live in a more immediate democracy. Hence, our democracy is more emotional. Furthermore, contrary to the past expectations, social media limited the pluralism, not enriched it. Social media environment leads us to a concentration of information and greater fragmentation of public.

Increasingly, people access news through Facebook and Google. Most likely these companies will remain the biggest aggregators of news. They start to have the same impact the traditional media used to have – because of their omnipresence, their reach and because of their perceived reliability (which, in fact, is of course questionable).

There’s more. Social media are being used by foreign hostile powers to undermine the stability of Western societies and the liberal democracy as such. Russia’s leading the way in this type of hybrid warfare. According to the data presented by Jakub Kalensky, (EEAS StratCOM Communications Officer), Russia spends as much as 1 bln USD annually on its media outlets, including the notorious Sputnik and Russia Today. This kind of money fuels intensive disinformation campaigns.

It’s high time we start discussing what kind of responsibility social media should bear for the content they publish. Once there’s responsibility, we can start discussing different approaches.

What if, Maduro asks, social platforms start to bear legal responsibility for the content viewed by many people? A post seen by 15 people is a private conversation. The one read by half a million people is not. The latter should be treated as a news item.

My thinking goes in the same direction. Free speech is fundamental but it is not limitless. An intentional lie disseminated with the aim of making as much damage as possible should not enjoy free speech protection. Hence we should start working on kind of “press laws” for the Internet (for more details, see my newest publication on the topice, available at WMCES web site or at Academia.edu)

There will never be a silver bullet for all problems, professor Ziga Turk of the University of Ljubliana says. He also points out to the fact that any meaningful legislation should follow intensive research. First and foremost, we should understand what is the real, measurable impact of social media on societies’ political behaviour.