Notes on “Securing the United States from Online Disinformation—A Whole-of-Society Approach”
Article by Steven Bradley
Link: https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/08/24/securing-united-states-from-online-disinformation-whole-of-society-approach-pub-82549
- Sounds like regulating content moderation policies. Cool idea, good luck getting it through the Senate and the high paid lobbyist trying to prevent any regulations.
- Maybe I’m too jaded..
- “The NCCIO would be charged with creating and maintaining a set of concrete guidelines to govern content moderation efforts by social platform operators, the scope of which would be constrained strictly to threats that impact national security matters, such as military operations, disaster response, human health, and election security.”
- How do you define that scope? Does it have to specifically mention the election to fall under election security? What if it just mentions a candidate? What if it just mentions an idea that one side agrees with and the other doesn’t? Do foreigners talking about those ideas fall under election security? Is there a successful system to determine which accounts are US citizens rightfully talking about those ideas and which are foreign actors? This scope will either limit you to not being able to moderate what needs to be moderated or it will grow to the point where you are moderating everything. You might be able to crack down on disinformation about say a polling place being closed when it isn’t but are they attacking the election infrastructure or are they attacking the will of the american people and their faith in the election process and trying to sow discourse and divide us?
- “governments should not be the arbiters of acceptable speech, national security poses a clear exception;”
- Seems like a slippery slope..
- “the assurance of U.S. security cannot be delegated to a collection of private entities who have demonstrated an inability, and at times unwillingness, to defend it”
- … although I do agree with this.
- “the lack of sufficient advancement in counter-disinformation technologies”
- Do we need counter-disinformation tech or do we need counter-disinformation strategy/ideas. Tech doesn’t solve all problems. It isn’t a new tech causing this, its old disinformation strategy on a new domain.
- That said, i’m sure we can come up with some cool tech to automate fighting disinformation.
