The company “Meta“, which includes Facebook and Instagram, plans to eliminate the so-called fact checkers. How will the fight against fake news be waged? What should we know about the change? Cybersecurity expert Christian Daskalov spoke to FACT on the topic.
- Mr. Daskalov, Meta eliminated the verification of information, and the explanation was that this gives freedom of speech. Is that true, or was Mark Zuckerberg forced to do this in order to be “up to date“ with the changes taking place in the USA?
- First of all, thank you very much to Facti.bg for the opportunity to comment on the topic. The media audience is one of the most free-thinking and I believe that it is undoubtedly excited by this development. Moreover, according to official data, 56% of Bulgarians use social media as a source of news, and Facebook in particular reaches 8 out of every 10 internet users in our country. One of my tasks as chairman of the European Digital Innovation Hub “Thrace“ is to inform the audience - citizens and businesses - about the changes in the regulatory environment that affect them - from internal practices for content moderation on social networks to major legislative initiatives at the pan-European and global level. In this case, there is a direct connection between the two. Freedom of speech is certainly a convenient pretext for these changes, but the reasons are deeper. Moderation of user-generated content is a prerequisite for a communication application to be available for download on our mobile devices through the Google Play or App Store.
In this sense, Facebook is not eliminating, but modifying, content moderation.
The refusal of any moderation would be against the interests of the corporation, and in this case, “interest shakes F(e)sa“, if I may paraphrase the popular folk wisdom. By refusing responsibility for what is published on the platform, Facebook would follow the fate of the Parler platform, which was made inaccessible to new subscribers at a certain point. Or, like one of the most popular applications for communication between teenagers in the United States - Kik, the lack of moderation would turn Facebook into a breeding ground for pornographic and even pedophile and other types of illegal content.
- In general, Mark Zuckerberg's position towards Donald Trump, who is already the “strong man of the day“, has changed. And this is because…
- The change is not based on ideology, but on corporate interest. “Meta“ is seeking to protect the new owner of the White House from the threats facing their competitors such as “ByteDance“ in line with the wave of demands and real actions to ban TikTok in a number of markets. If Trump's team is favorable to the corporate practices of “Meta“, this may greatly impact the political initiative of the European Union authorities, which hold in their hands at least three serious instruments for influencing Zuckerberg's businesses, namely the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which have come into force in recent months.
By the way, a penal procedure is underway against Bulgaria by the EC due to the lack of implemented procedures for control of some of these legislative acts by the designated authority - the Communications Regulatory Commission.
In other words, Bulgarian users will only be able to more actively defend their rights when their interests are violated by platforms like Facebook - be it due to unlawfully removed content or due to targeting them based on their characteristics - gender, age, profession, education, sexual orientation, and others. Similar preventive defense strategies have been adopted and demonstrated in recent months by other technology corporations based in the United States - trying to exploit the theme of protecting national interests and the line of protectionism in the context of changed geopolitical realities.
- How much more fake news, since there is no one to check it, will we face now?
- We will continue to face the same amount of fake news as before - there is no convincing evidence of the effect of the current regime and Facebook admits this.
What they do not admit is that they never sought such an effect, because it would be harmful to their business.
The more contentious, divisive content there is on the platform, the more time users spend on it fighting with each other. When social fragmentation is achieved, the effect of inflating balloons follows - the camps become radicalized, which in turn leads to higher engagement - time spent in these echo chambers. In fact, the agenda of platforms like Facebook has more references to William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" than to Orwell's "1984". In theory, fact-checking should limit the amount of manipulative content, fake or not, but in practice, parent company "Meta" is the largest distributor of such content through its own algorithms. The algorithms that the corporation's developers implement in the work of the social network ensure that posts that engage the largest wave of comments "For" are most actively circulated. or “Against“, likes or dislikes, provoked by or provoking collective fear, anger, unhealthy curiosity, born of embodied sensationalism, extraordinaryness, risk of falling behind. The boring personal and social lives of our relatives and friends simply do not sell as well as viral materials of dubious origin and claims that generate clicks, clicks – traffic, and traffic – revenue for Facebook.
- Am I becoming the object of being flooded with increasingly manipulated information. We saw how social media was used in the presidential election in Romania. What did this show us?
- Eurostat data shows that 86% of Europeans agree that the rapid spread of disinformation is a major problem for democracy today, and 71% of citizens often encounter examples of disinformation. The statistics are convincing - the authorities that are called upon to ensure public security are clearly not addressing the fundamental problems facing security in the digital world and, unfortunately, are directing their efforts towards the pursuit of counterproductive goals such as the repression of individual freedoms. For example - last year, a series of arrests were observed in the UK in connection with the opinion expressed on social networks by ordinary citizens who are concerned about migration issues or crime rates. We do not have a reaction against those who profit from the well-calibrated exploitation of one or another social scenario, but we have a blow against the ordinary citizen. I believe that algorithms, which are de facto a tool for conducting social engineering by ordinary fraudsters, commercial hackers (growth hackers) and agents engaged in cognitive warfare, should be regulated, and not the right of citizens to distinguish truth from lies for themselves or to speak freely against their own governments and the problems in their respective societies. Teaching a course on social engineering for masters at the University of Plovdiv, I can say that there are a number of measures that I teach, such as basic cyber hygiene training, which, if implemented, would have a much better deterrent effect on the spread of manipulated information. Because 98% of attacks rely on the human factor - taking personal actions that are detrimental to our interest. And we know that we often do the opposite of what we are told. That is why we must first build internal awareness.
- Now, it seems that only human intelligence is relied on to assess the reliability of information. At the same time, artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to produce fake news. Is this part of evolution…
- As a doctor in organization and management of open technology projects, I can categorically state that to counteract fake news and its orchestrated spread with or without the means of artificial intelligence, we should start with the mandatory implementation of the right to access information about the current version of the code that controls what we see on social networks, and the ability to signal regulators about the malicious tactics implanted there, related to the targeted exploitation of vulnerabilities, described in detail in thick books on psychology and behavioral science. Such even partial enforcement of basic open source principles, established for decades in technological practice, such as the right to know how a certain system works, could be carried out on the basis of the Digital Services Act, which I have already mentioned.
But Brussels lacks the political will to enter into battle with those who earn billions from manipulating our consumer behavior in order to extract higher commercial profits.
The Bulgarian Cybersecurity Association has prepared, presented and well-received at the national and international levels a legislative initiative that would allow any ethical hacker to check a certain system for vulnerabilities intentionally or accidentally embedded in it that have a harmful impact on the end user. It is about the regulated research and reporting of such vulnerabilities, which will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in cybersecurity incidents and will increase the cyber hygiene of citizens. Hopefully, more citizens and organizations will support us so that this initiative becomes part of the agenda of the institutions.
To be continued…