New York, June 12 – While digital technologies are crucial tools to keep societies connected and informed, they have also enabled the spread of hate speech and disinformation that transformed into a global threat, the United Nations said at the launch a new policy brief calling for information integrity.
The brief said, “The danger cannot be overstated. Social media-enabled hate speech and disinformation can lead to violence and death. The ability to disseminate large-scale disinformation to undermine scientifically established facts poses an existential risk to humanity and endangers democratic institutions and fundamental human rights.”
The policy brief is available at https://www.un.org/en/common-agenda/policy-briefs
The brief said hate speech and mis- and disinformation have spread to all major issues. For U.N.-led works, they have challenged and delayed urgent action on climate change, development and peacekeeping. Mis- and disinformation about the virus and vaccination also widely spread during the Covid-19 pandemic. The brief said any future solutions to protect information integrity should be future-proof. But the fast development of potentially powerful advance in artificial intelligence is also a matter of concern.
It said Open AI’s ChatGPT-3 platform, which was launched in November 2022 and gained 100 million users by January 2023, has “unimaginable potential” to address global challenges. However, “there are serious and urgent concerns about the equally powerful potential of recent advances in artificial intelligence – including image generators and video deepfakes – to threaten information integrity. Recent reporting and research have shown that generative artificial intelligence tools generated disinformation and hate speech, convincingly presented to users as fact”.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio said the proliferation of hate and lies in the digital space is currently causing grave global harm, fueling conflict, death and destruction, threatening democracy and human rights and undermining public health and climate action.
“Social media platforms have helped the United Nations to engage people around the world in our pursuit of peace, dignity and human rights on a healthy planet,” he said. “But today, this same technology is often a source of fear, not hope. Digital platforms are being misused to subvert science and spread disinformation and hate to billions of people.”
The U.N. chief said the organization is developing a Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms, which would provide a “gold standard for guiding action to strengthen information integrity.” The code will be presented to the Summit of the Future taking place in 2024.
Guterres said the proposals in the policy brief are aimed at creating “guardrails to help governments come together around guidelines that promote facts, while exposing conspiracies and lies, and safeguarding freedom of expression and information; and to help tech companies navigate difficult ethical and legal issues and build business models based on a healthy information ecosystem.”
Independent media
The brief supports a strengthened independent media at a time dozens of countries have taken measures to undermine press freedom and 85 per cent of the world’s population experienced a decline in press freedom in the last five years.
“Real public debate relies on the facts, told clearly, and reported ethically and independently. Ethical reporters, with quality training and working conditions, have the skills to restore balance in the face of mis- and disinformation. They can offer a vital service: accurate, objective and reliable information about the issues that matter. “
The policy brief is available at https://www.un.org/en/common-agenda/policy-briefs
How mis- and disinformation affects major climate and environment programs
Following are excerpts from the policy briefs. “Mis- and disinformation have delayed urgently needed action to ensure a liveable future for the planet. Climate mis- and disinformation can be understood as false or misleading content that undercuts the scientifically agreed basis for the existence of human-induced climate change, its causes and impacts. Coordinated campaigns are seeking to deny, minimize or distract from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific consensus and derail urgent action to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.”
“A small but vocal minority of climate science denialists continue to reject the consensus position and command an outsized presence on some digital platforms. For example, in 2022, random simulations by civil society organizations revealed that Facebook’s algorithm was recommending climate denialist content at the expense of climate science.
“On Twitter, uses of the hashtag #climatescam shot up from fewer than 2,700 a month in the first half of 2022 to 80,000 in July and nearly 193,000 in December. The phrase was also featured by the platform among the top results in the search for “climate”.
“In February 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called out climate disinformation for the first time, stating that a “deliberate undermining of science” was contributing to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.
“Some fossil fuel companies commonly deploy a strategy of ‘greenwashing’, misleading the public into believing that a company or entity is doing more to protect the environment, and less to harm it, than it is. The companies are not acting alone. Efforts to confuse the public and divert attention away from the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry are enabled and supported by advertising and public relations providers, advertising tech companies, news outlets and digital platforms. Advertising and public relations firms that create greenwashing content and third parties that distribute it are collectively earning billions from these efforts to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny and accountability. Public relations firms have run hundreds of campaigns for coal, oil and gas companies”. (By J. Tuyet Nguyen)
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