Win the battle of disinformation, support local journalism!

We are watching the best and worst of social media play out right in front of us with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We have witnessed Volodymyr Zelenskyy use social media to extend pleas across the world to governments, sometimes while he is rushing away from fighting himself, with nearly immediate impact on getting increased help and weapons into Ukraine.

The flip or dark side of that picture is the disinformation campaign being led by Russia across social media platforms to deny the presence of war and to blame the Ukrainians for starting the fighting.

The Russians have excelled at social media targeting of Americans; we have not shared their same curiosity for microtargeting messages across their large and diverse population centers.

We don’t seem to give what we get.

So yes, we are in a game of catch up, but the score now shows some promise for eventually leveling out.  At least the conversations are getting smarter. We are all responsible here, for the good and the bad and eventually for how the outcomes are managed.

Spending three days learning about “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” with both conservatives and liberals presenting together, at the University of Chicago, sponsored by the Institute of Politics and The Atlantic, was not lost on attendees for its critical and important timing.

It was a bipartisan appeal from content experts and legislators alike, and left us with critically important action items we can all do that I will share here with you at the conclusion of this piece.

But first, the rants.

We have heard arguments that social media is a sacred cow because it protects and defends freedom of speech and the First Amendment. There wasn’t a presenter there who wouldn’t call themselves defenders of the Constitution, but the harsh reality is that the First Amendment is not there to protect violence, threats or incitement to imminent lawless activity, according to Mary McCord, former assistant attorney general for National Security and executive director of Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Every terrorist activity has a social media component. “Disinformation brought everyone together on January 6th,” she emphasized.

There is recruitment, radicalization, and intense engagement with extremist material.

“Disinformation is a tool to help unwrap democracy for those who want to ... social media with big data and microtargeting and profit incentives becomes a weapon,” said David Axelrod, the Institute of Politics founder and chair, and the organizer of this conference.

These technology platforms are not a public trust — they impact on the public —  but their goal is to make profit.

There needs to be a policy for policy makers to install some guardrails and rules of the road.

Regulations need to be tightened.

Jonah Goldberg, conservative chief editor of The Dispatch, emphasized the problems on the democracy side are structural, endemic and very real.

On the disinformation side, the erosion of technology allows communicators to go around institutions like never before. Editors in traditional journalism were supposed to be the circuit breaker on bad ideas. Come back to me when you have toned this down would be the standard bearer of traditional gatekeeping, reflected Goldberg.

Now there is a class of social media “experts” who have no editor or filter. We are living increasingly in a filterless society and he would argue we have democratized too much and political parties can’t be gatekeepers.

“They have no edit function on the craziness.” Goldberg stated and went on to say social media encourages mobocracy. It encourages the rule of mob politics.  

There isn’t too much democracy, Adrienne Lafrance from The Atlantic disagreed, adding that it is that it is in the hands of too few tech platforms.

The platform Telegram was used by January 6th folks in planning their insurrection of the Capitol, but as she then compared, Telegram is also the same platform being used by the Ukrainians to plan their resistance efforts.

No tool is neutral, is LaFrance’s point. It is how the companies are incentivized.

These social media companies are really designed to be profit making yet are often rather at odds with what they say they are doing for democracy.

My promised call to action based on what I learned at this conference:

First, familiarize yourself with some legislation that has made significant headway in recent months.

It is a co-sponsored piece by our Midwestern senators Amy Klobochar of Minnesota and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act’s primary focus would be to ban dominant digital platforms (such as Facebook or Google) from favoring their own services and products over those of their competitors. It has advanced out of the Judiciary Committee and is on its way hopefully for a full Senate vote by the Fourth of July, indicated Klobuchar.

Some experts consider this act the best shot at creating substantial reforms to laws that govern Big Tech companies. Reach out to federal legislators to encourage its Senate passing.

Second,  let’s get newspapers back into circulation, and subscribe to yours if you aren’t already doing so!  President Barack Obama, in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, said that without small-town newspapers, his early Illinois campaign would never have evolved into a successful U.S. Senate race. Obama said traveling to rural communities and meeting with small newspapers gave him a fair hearing without which he would never have been given the chance to explain his positions.  Obama went on to say that local newspapers are rapidly disappearing, and in small towns across the country, community sources of news are being replaced by conservative pundits and digital newsletters with manufactured information pumped out into those communities. 

Local journalism has frayed beyond recognition.   

If he went out there today as a first-time candidate, Obama said, he could not get past a set of impenetrable assumptions.

Today there would be a different set of barriers caused by disinformation.  

So whether on the world stage as what we are witnessing in the Russian invasion and disinformation campaigns about Ukraine, or back here in our communities, or in the quiet of your living room on your laptop, the stakes of these disinformation issues are destructive and need to be confronted by all of us, combated and won, as only good information can do.

(Marcia Rogers, who divides her time between Cedar Rapids and Chicago, is a political strategist and freelance writer.)