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Cyber wars and the new media battleground

Cyber wars and the new media battleground

Dozens of countries are using armies of online opinion-shapers to try to manipulate democracies. The seriousness of the situation requires the most serious and open of responses from Google, Facebook and Twitter, writes Raymond Snoddy

The charge sheet against the social media networks is growing all the time. They have been accused forcefully, of draining off the advertising revenue of the established media without always offering much that is meaningful in return.

Some of the numbers are at the very least suggestive. The UK national and regional press enjoyed an advertising cake of £5 billion in 2005 compared to £2.3 billion today while in the same period Google’s UK advertising revenue rose from £1 billion to £6 billion.

They have also been adept at using their international reach to minimise the taxes paid in any one jurisdiction – but that is another story.

Another important item on the charge sheet is that despite wealth that would put King Midas in the shade and control over the world’s smartest algorithms, the response to purveyors of hate crime and terrorism has been totally inadequate so far.

At the Society of Editors conference in Cambridge this week, Ronan Harris, Google’s managing director for UK and Ireland, put forward a plausible defence, at least on the advertising front.

Harris noted that the majority of Google’s advertising revenue came from search and existing publishers were not in the search business.

Google News carried no advertising at all and the company had commissioned a study by Deloitte showing that Google News had generated traffic worth £650 million last year to publishers in the UK, France, Spain and Germany.

In fact, the Google executive claimed that in display advertising in every deal the company did, the publisher keeps around two thirds of the revenue – as high as 90 per cent on automated.

Like it or lump it, we are all in the hands of the algorithm creators”

You could see editors’ minds whirring in the same direction – if that is true, where exactly does all the money go then?

The “F word” was not of course mentioned, although it was heavily implied that Facebook had an entirely different model and that they might be the ones casing all the trouble.

Another Facebook executive suggested privately afterwards that intermediaries were perhaps to blame.

As for hate crime and jihadi postings, the algorithms were getting better all the time – the more information and examples you put into the system the better the AI gets at spotting trouble. Google was also getting better at taking down fake news and inaccurate or unacceptable material more quickly.

But Google would not – and could not – review material in advance.

Google, Harris claims, is not a publisher in any conventional sense and sister company YouTube posts more than 400 hours of video a minute. So how could you control such a stream in advance.

Google, the non-publisher, comes in peace, wants the widest number of partnerships with existing media and, like it or lump it, we are all in the hands of the algorithm creators.

They are all arguments that will be fiercely contested, particularly the claim that Google is not a publisher and therefore does not have the full responsibilities of a publisher, for the material it sends out into the world.

Many will also continue to argue that Google and the other social media giants have in the past been defensive and slow in taking action against fake news and bullying and hateful communications.

It was only a few hours after the conclusion of the Society of Editors conference that the charges against the tech players of Silicon Valley – and the stakes – got a lot higher.

In her speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Prime Minister Theresa May went on the attack to accuse Putin’s Russia of “weaponising information” and using specially generated “news” to sow discord in the UK and western democratic societies.

The issue has been bubbling along for weeks and cynics could suggest that the Prime Minister just might be looking for a foreign target to distract from her disarray at home.

That would be to trivialise a vitally important issue and of course it is the social media networks who have pumped out the weaponised information, and at the very least contributed to what the Financial Times’ editor Lionel Barber called (again at the SoE conference) “the decline in civic discourse” in society.

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There is now little doubt in the minds of everyone, apart from President Trump, that Russia is using online disinformation to try to challenge or break up democratic institutions in its own interest. It has taken the form of supporting Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK and far right groups across Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has complained that her website has been hit by thousands of cyber attacks – many of them with Russian IP addresses.

Research by Swansea University and the University of California, Berkley, reported by The Times, makes it clear that more than 150,000 Twitter accounts based in Russia, which had concentrated on the Ukraine, switched to Brexit in the days before last year’s referendum.

More than 39,000 tweets were posted on referendum day and were viewed hundreds of millions of times. All of this goes way beyond the responsibilities of the media, whether old or new, and into the realm of geo-politics, governments and intelligence services.

The very least the tech giants can do is to be as open, honest and co-operative as possible.

Last month Twitter handed the US Congress details of 2,752 accounts it linked to the Internet Research Bureau in St Petersburg and Google is believed to be investigating $100,000 worth of questionable advertising.

Facebook – how can we put it – has been careful with its words.

The previous line was that there was no evidence that Russia used Facebook to interfere in Brexit.

Now, according to BuzzFeed, a spokesman says there was no evidence of “significant co-ordination” but declined to say what significant meant in this context.

Damian Collins, who chairs the DCMS Select Committee and who was prescient in launching an investigation into fake news, has written to both Twitter and Facebook seeking urgent information and clarification on Russian-based accounts.

It’s not just Russia, or even Russia, China and North Korea.

According to a new report from the US government-funded charity, Freedom House, no less than 30 countries are using armies of online opinion-shapers to try to manipulate democracies.

The seriousness of the situation requires the most serious and open response from Google, Facebook and Twitter, whether they accept they are publishers or not.

As cyber wars continue to intensify, at least a morsel of good news on physical terrorism. The 2017 Global Terrorism Index, just published, shows that for the second year in a row the total number of global deaths from terrorism has declined – down by 22 per cent from a peak in 2014.

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