Guardrails Democracy. An Alarmingly Unpopular Opinion on Information Warfare
Focusing on tools and the sole existence of bad actors is bikeshedding
How many times have you heard experts go into deceitful information, tweets and memes posted around?
How often do is information leakage mentioned, for the purpose of gathering data on voters, in order to sway them into making certain decisions? Unlawfully, or unethically shared personal details from social media sites?
What is the ratio of coverage on interference in votes and referendums by a foreign state to other news?
Now, when was the last time you heard the keywords “education” or “training”? This is not limited to mainstream media, or media in general. How often was education discussed or even mentioned among your friends and family? If this point was raised, could you honestly call that a discussion?
—
Most professionals, enthusiasts circles where knowledge matters, and academia in general, rely on explicit or implicit authority structure where information in discovered, cross-referenced, verified and shared. Even if many people don’t realize it, verification from top to the very bottom is the foundation of trust: you can take claims apart and find how we arrived at given conclusions (compulsory note: the “reproducibility crisis” obviously can be spun to make people question any sophisticated structure of information verification, and as a consequence — information itself; people forget that levels of confidence in research translate to same levels of confidence in their conclusions — nonetheless, we should pay attention to verifiability because it’s the bedrock of today’s world).
Likening people to emotionless things built with proof-reinforced logic often creates more problems than intended, but to get the point across:
- you wouldn’t rely on the server abstaining from sending malicious messages to protect the client application — you assume the worst and just filter these HTML tags,
- you wouldn’t rely on legal protections to secure your organization against employee hacking — you assume the worst and just set up strong passwords and 2FA,
- you wouldn’t rely on two police officers guarding a tent with assault weapons — you assume the worst just put the weapons in a safe.
Would you rely on attempts to keep relentless attacks from exploiting people vulnerable to trust mis-assessment because they don’t know better?
“Assuming the worst” sounds pessimistic but is thought and operational shortcut; you already “assume the worst” and wear a helmet on a construction side, fasten seatbelts, make 911/112 always callable, don’t allow judges to be removed and prevent presidents from staying in power forever. We don’t have an anarcho-technocracy and still do what we can to eliminate originating causes, but when originating causes either appear often enough to be considered a permanent problem or are in any possible capacity to occur again, pursuing them is not enough.
The “Guardrails Democracy” is a view propelled by an unfortunate momentum in politics, journalism, and in effect the society. “Guardrails Democracy” sees a malevolent effort to subvert and applies an emergency plan, the short-term solution of locating the originating cause and dedicating all resources to eliminate it. At some point, though, it’s increasingly noticeable that it believes the root cause is the originating cause, and there is no long-term solution on the horizon. “Guardrails Democracy” guides or enforces good behavior, but what happens when the guardrails are no longer available? The society in general isn’t brought up critically-minded, they don’t know how to follow the road of reason; nobody has told them how.
The idea of a fact-checker has been borrowed from the job description (one that involves diving into books and transcripts of local speeches given twenty years ago) to become a related personal trait out of necessity, involving looking at URLs, conducting very basic cross-checking of sources, own mini-research and going a little bit up or down the ladder of the information authority structure; this should be natural to all or most, and it’s not limited media literacy.
The Shorenstein Center defines mis-information, dis-information and mal-information as core parts of the “information disorder”: the first two are associated with false information, but no less attention should be paid to harassment or hate speech. That’s where we not only deal with how to interpret information, but also how to handle it. In some cases mal-information can be safely categorized as noise that will be filtered by the platform. People should be taught to click Report and don’t worry too much about it, otherwise they’ll fall victim to psychological denial-of-service, often intended to personally affect them rather than convey a (false) message.
Popular vote, the basis of today’s democracies, needs to be interpreted as putting our greatest asset — our minds, the decentralized, possibly educated and experienced network making best out of available information — into action, not the fruits of carefully curated news feeds.
The issue hardly only affects democracy; intellectual abilities have been the core of humanity, and investing in their improvement in subsequent generations would serve this idea well.
