Protecting Democracy from Disinformation: Normative Threats and Policy Responses

Abstract

<jats:p> Following public revelations of interference in the United States 2016 election, there has been widespread concern that online disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy. Governments have responded with a wide range of policies. However, there is little clarity in elite policy debates or academic literature about what it actually means for disinformation to endanger democracy, and how different policies might protect it. This article proposes that policies to address disinformation seek to defend three important normative goods of democratic systems: self-determination, accountable representation, and public deliberation. Policy responses to protect these goods tend to fall in three corresponding governance sectors: self-determination is the focus of international and national security policies; accountable representation is addressed through electoral regulation; and threats to the quality of public debate and deliberation are countered by media regulation. The article also reveals some of the challenges and risks in these policy sectors, which can be seen in both innovative and failed policy designs. </jats:p>

Disinformation and Narratives

“…Usually, the point of departure for these studies and essays was the normative idea that the legitimacy of democracies requires a process of deliberation among its citizens that is facilitated through truthful communication (McKay & Tenove, 2020, p. 2;Waisbord, 2018). Often, the focus lay on how untruths and lies were generated and distributed in the digital sphere (Miller & Vaccari, 2020;Tenove, 2020). The gross violation of factual correctness appeared to be the central problem, as Mejia et al notice: "most […] seemed to agree that only this new concept of the post-truth could explain how a racist, misogynistic, neo-nationalist member of the economic elite could win a presidential election" (2018, p. 110).…”

Digital Threats to Democracy: Comparative Lessons and Possible Remedies

“…For many observers, these threats seemed to culminate in the unanticipated electoral outcomes of 2016, which featured a U.S. presidential election and a U.K.-wide referendum on the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, colloquially known as Brexit. We now know that disinformation campaigns combined with the mass deployment of automated bots and trolls were coordinated with the purpose of interfering with democratic processes in each country (as discussed in this special issue by Golovchenko et al (2020) with respect to Russian interference in U.S. elections and by Tenove 2020 in terms of the policy responses to these threats to national sovereignty).…”

“…The need to empirically address these challenges also reveals the limitations of some of the normative underpinnings on which research in political communication, and digital media and politics in particular, has rested so far (Bucy and D’Angelo 2004; Chadwick 2019; Strömbäck 2005). Faced with the concrete possibility that the current configuration of the affordances of digital media may exacerbate certain long-standing threats to democracy, and given the delicate balance between the need to protect societies from these threats and the risk of limiting fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, researchers have the right and the duty to contribute knowledge and ideas to a public debate that is often fraught with short attention spans by the public, indulgence to simplification by journalists, facile posturing by politicians, hasty solutionism by policymakers, and prevarication by tech companies (Nash 2019; Tromble and McGregor 2019; see Tenove 2020 in this Special Issue for a review of existing policy responses).…”

“…This is the theme of Tenove’s (2020) policy analysis of responses to disinformation across ten countries and the European Union. Policy choices are largely shaped by how a problem is defined, and online disinformation is no exception.…”

“…Finally, when disinformation is framed as a threat to the quality of public discourse, the main policy responses entail media regulation, particularly targeting how social media companies deal with different kinds of illegal or legal but problematic content. Tenove’s (2020) analysis is helpful both as a conceptual map and heuristic device for researchers and as an inventory of different approaches and options for policymakers—including the different risks and trade-offs they entail.…”