ICT4Peace Special Advisor Sanjana Hattotuwa describes the challenge we face from the effects of disinformation in undermining our trust in democracy.
“Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”
— Voltaire, Candide
Jawaharlal Nehru in his speech on the cusp of India’s independence from the British in 1947 spoke of India’s tryst with destiny. A year later, and in the wake of India’s independence, Sri Lanka — then called Ceylon — was granted independence as well. Today, it’s an open question as to how both countries have managed to overcome postcolonial legacies and grasp the nettle of their democratic potential.
It’s likely Nehru’s tryst today would have been with disinformation as destiny, defined by the dangerous designs of demagogues. For decades, my home Sri Lanka and South Asia have suffered from a democratic deficit that predated social media and was amplified because of it. We’ve seen, heard and read the media reports of violent upheaval. But this article is about a lesser-known phenomenon I’ve likened to a cancerous growth, like a digital Novichok introduced over time by influential voices, that eviscerates civic relations, electoral integrity and democratic institutions.
This phenomenon, increasingly spoken of in New Zealand, is disinformation — a term that can be defined academically, though I often choose not to. Voltaire’s quote, above, calls us to tend to our gardens. It’s a metaphor I use frequently, likening democracy to a complex ecosystem like a forest, requiring constant care and conservation for survival.
For me, coming from a country teetering on the precipice of a failed state, the role, reach and relevance of disinformation in damaging democracy isn’t merely an academic pursuit. It is a lived and situated experience. Sri Lanka today is facing intergenerational harms on account of policies pursued by populist leaders, and over the past decade, their manipulation of social media to capture, manipulate and sustain a subscription — nay, an addiction — to misleading narratives actively shaping attitudes, beliefs and perceptions.
Disinformation
Disinformation’s design is a curious one — necessarily public, and yet often impervious to critical study, with complex webs of deceit beneath what’s presented as benign, caring or dispassionate.
Scholars sometimes call this phenomenon a dark signature, shaping partisan, prejudicial perceptions through the strategic seeding of content and commentary designed to appear as authentic. What’s powerfully presented by influential voices — from politicians to priests — as just, urgent, ordained or necessary to overcome complex challenges, is in fact thinly-veiled expedient, populist narratives aimed to secure parochial gains and political authority.
Disinformation’s Damage in Sri Lanka
In Sri Lanka, even knowing this doesn’t help inoculate society against the harmful effects of disinformation, which is now endemic and a disease defying cure.
All this of course was present prior to social media, contributing to the systemic violence of the country I grew up in. However, after around 2010, the initial promise of social media to help democracy quickly turned into a more injurious scaffolding, amplifying harm, hate and harassment. Where we find ourselves today, as a country and society, is due to disinformation’s interweave with a political culture that eviscerated our social fabric.
Aotearoa Cannot Be Complacent
This is usually where many in New Zealand take some comfort, believing that geographic distance from war and a fundamentally different community, culture and context protect this country from the ravages that tore mine asunder.
In response, I can say that a high-trust society, where citizens don’t expect disinformation’s dark designs to ever take root, is far more vulnerable than a country where public institutions have always been weak, which counterintuitively results in a citizenry less reliant on them and thus somewhat better able to navigate democratic deficits.
My argument goes back to Voltaire and Hemingway, who noted that tending to what grows in a garden needs to be a proactive process, and they warn us that what may appear remote and distant often comes about quicker than expected.
Democracy Is not a Certainty
The expectation that democracy will simply endure is a widely held but misplaced belief — even in New Zealand.
The historically low turnout at local government elections, or the lack of interest in Board of Trustee elections in schools, even when fascists and neo-Nazis present themselves as candidates, or those with clandestine connections to conspiratorial disinformation networks, suggest many citizens can’t see threats to democracy for what they are today, aside from how they will evolve in the future.
Social and political relations founded on the assumption that individuals mean and do no harm, is no longer a valid basis to appreciate what’s going on. The capture of institutions through entry points offering the least resistance is the thin edge of a wedge aimed at weakening social cohesion, fundamentally changing public institutions and policymaking.
Deliberate Fostering of Toxic Opinion
Part of what disinformation targets is political culture. But what the pandemic has highlighted is the inequality and inequity dividing communities.
Consistently, research finds a few influential individuals and insidious networks adroitly producing divisive narrative frames to influence social and political structures to a degree greater than the sum of their membership. These efforts are succeeding.
More visible today in New Zealand than a year ago, for example, is the degree to which antagonism seeded on social media is on public display — from frothing expletives screamed and livestreamed to social media while first blocking and then following the Prime Minister’s vehicle convoy, to the vulgar, vicious and deeply misogynist abuse targeting her in public meetings, which is by order of magnitude worse online.
This terrible toxicity extends to other female MPs, Māori wahine, the LGBTIQ+ community, visible minorities, refugees and immigrants.
The hate and harms I now study daily in New Zealand ecologies of disinformation are more violent and sustained than those I studied for doctoral research at Otago University around significant social, and political violence in Sri Lanka since 2018.
Disinformation Undermines Trust in Community
None of this suggests New Zealand is guaranteed a fate that mirrors the tragic condition of home. But there’s a lot that’s unravelling, at pace. And therein lies the rub.
Responses to disinformation, or post-pandemic information disorders discoverable in the public domain and reported in the media are invariably linked to the March 2019 Christchurch massacre, and more broadly, terrorism. But though there’s overlap, the study of disinformation is fundamentally different from the prevention of violent extremism, or terrorism.
Disinformation isn’t stochastic — there’s nothing random about it; it isn’t unpredicatable. It is an everyday performance, with a script constantly adapting to domestic, and international developments, perfecting the delivery of division through networked choreographies that waltz around existing laws, regulations, policies and policing.
There’s a metronomic cadence to content production, strategically geared to keep subscribers very angry, or sad, for longer periods during the day, and every day.
Sustained states of heightened emotion shape psychosocial consequences which impact relationships, from the personal to the political. Radicalisation pathways are created — pathways that policymakers and parents aren’t even aware of, but which young people who are part of anti-vaxx networks risk being tempted by and exposed to.
None of this is good for democracy. All of this, and much more, forms the basis of what I now study in New Zealand, which even a year ago, I didn’t expect would be a Rorschach blot that was like the stain of disinformation back home. But recalling James Baldwin on racism: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We must confront disinformation for what it is, does and has designs around. New Zealand’s social cohesion depends on it.
First published in Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 275 October 2022: 8-9