BigGrizzly

This constellation of factors—increasing disinformation on some platforms, the closure of tools used to study social media, lawsuits against investigations on disinformation—suggests we may face an uphill battle to understand what happens in the digital public sphere in the near future. That’s very bad news as we head into 2024, a year that features key elections in countries including the UK, Mexico, Pakistan, Taiwan, India and the US.

Elections in Taiwan are of special interest to China, and journalists report that Taiwan has been flooded by disinformation portraying the US as a threat to the territory. One story claimed that the Taiwanese government would send 150,000 blood samples to the US so America could engineer a virus to kill Chinese people. The goal of these stories is to encourage Taiwanese voters to oppose alliances with the US and push for closer ties to mainland China. Taiwanese NGOs are developing fact-checking initiatives to combat false narratives, but are also affected by reduced access to information on social media.

The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, has enacted legislation to combat fake news on social media and it seems likely that these new laws will target government critics more effectively than Modi’s supporters. The 2024 US presidential election, meanwhile, is shaping up to be a battle of the disinformation artists. Serial liar Donald Trump, who made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his four years in office, is competing not only against the incumbent Joe Biden, but against anti-vaccine crusader Robert F Kennedy, who was banned from Instagram for medical disinformation, before having his account restored when he became a presidential candidate.

If there is any hope for our ability to understand what really happens on social media next year, it may come from the European Union, where the Digital Services Act demands transparency from platforms operating on the continent. But enforcement actions are slow, and wars and elections are fast by comparison. The surge of disinformation around Israel and Gaza may point to a future in which what happens online is literally unknowable.

sur le rôle de catalyseur des réseaux sociaux
Massacre des Rohingya : « Facebook a joué un rôle central dans la montée du climat de haine » en Birmanie
►https://archive.ph/DMWO8

#internet #média #réseaux_sociaux #X #meta #facebook #propagande #désinformation #opacité #critique