The proliferation of disinformation is of increasing concern among citizens of countries where elections are due to be held this year and they want a multi-stakeholder approach to address it effectively beyond the election year.
According to UNESCO-IPSOS, recent findings based on the Global Survey of Online Disinformation and Hate Speech, conducted in August and September last year in 16 countries where elections are anticipated in 2024, 87% of 8,000 respondents expressed concern about the impact of disinformation on election integrity, with 47% being “very concerned”.
The finding, released in November, reveals that 68% of respondents found disinformation most prevalent on social media. Moreover, 67% of internet users have encountered hate speech online and 58% believe it’s most prevalent on Facebook.
The statistics show more people want a multi-stakeholder regulation of online communications, with 88% believing that both governments and regulatory bodies and believing that 90% social media platforms should address disinformation and hate speech, especially during election campaigns, to ensure that social media platforms are trustworthy and safe for users.
These views resonate well among democratic change makers in the Asia-Pacific region, who gathered at the sixth Bali Civil Society and Media Forum (BCMF) in Bali, Indonesia, between November 28 and 30, 2023, to address the increasing complex disinformation situations around the region and to find a more effective ways to mitigate its impact on and prevent harming election integrity and undermining democratic governance.
The annual gathering, organised by Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and Indonesia’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, took place amid the rise of political authoritarianism in many parts of the world, including Asia’s democratic countries, where high internet penetration and changing patterns of news and information consumption, not to mention polarised politics, armed and ethno-religious conflicts and post-pandemic economic woes, are factors that expose society to more dangerous online disinformation, manipulation and hate speech.
Closer to home, people in Taiwan go national polls on January 13th and in Indonesia a month after that many fear the outcome of which is detrimental to democratic transition in Asia.
In Taiwan, any outlandish claim or hoax, which raises public anxiety over rising tensions in the South China Sea, could easily swing these first head-to-head presidential and legislative elections since 2020.
The race is between the ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party and its main challenger, the conservative Kuomintang, which contests on pro-Beijing engagement agenda.
In Indonesia, its citizens’ limited information literacy and the uneven digital infrastructure on populated islands has been a significant challenge to combating disinformation since the last presidential elections in 2018. The stakes are, however, much higher in this presidential election.
With the rising popularity of pro-military conservative presidential candidates among the country’s largest voting segment, the young people, thanks in part to more insidious and intrusive disinformation campaigns and tactics and the spectre of no matched challengers, this election looks set to bring in elected executives who lean towards the autocracy, with barely no checks and balances provided by a weak opposition in coalition run parliament.
Thailand’s latest elections: Thriving “malinformation” is more insidious
Thailand’s May 14 elections last year, and the post-election political order, offer a sharp learning curve in the battle against political disinformation during the elections. Cofact’s online monitoring and fact verification work shows that the spread of “malinformation” (factual information with malicious intent) is more prevalent across platforms after elections, which is also, at times, peppered with the opinion of the creators and private messages for the targets.
This “fear” conspiracy theory, related to a foreign network seeking to overthrow the monarchy, allegedly related to an armed separatist movement in Southern Thailand, is designed with particular time-sensitivity to set public opinion against the Move Forward Party (MFP) and it ultimately prevented the wining party (MFP) from forming a new collation government.
This type of malinformation works to justify the use of questionable parliamentary rules and lawfare to dissuade MFP and to propel the estranged pro-establishment and populist regime, led by the Pheu Thai Party, the runner up in the election, into power – spinning the cycle of a toxic political environment further and preventing rationale and fact-based discussion about the country’s tumultuous struggle to mend and sustain democracy in the post-election period.
At the BCMF meetings, emerging digital and data investigation and analysis initiatives, to address political disinformation and election manipulation in civil society, such as Cofact, DEAL-WeWatch, and WeVis, were among reactive approaches discussed.
To address disinformation of a sophisticated character, however, requires a more balanced and multi-stakeholder approach, not only to minimise its impacts on election integrity but also to tackle the root causes, to prevent it from further harming society.
Among the crucial recommendation discussed are an allocation of more resources and effort to empowering citizens to recognise difficult types of disinformation through digital and information literacy, facilitating stakeholders, including social media platforms and the online media, to create adaptive regulations and to explore advanced tools and means of verification to prevent the virality of manipulative information.
The ultimate goal is to build a coherent and multi-layered response, aimed at discouraging the supply side of disinformation, building workable content moderation on platforms and improving users’ information literacy, while sustaining the fact-checking efforts as the frontline in combatting disinformation.
Finally, the emerging consensus is that, while it is crucial to draw a line between the legitimate information operations of election-winning strategies around the world, online manipulation, disinformation and hate speech, targeting political dissidents, women in political leadership in particular and voters, are not to be tolerated.
The buy-in is freedom of expression and online safety, which are to be protected, not traded-off.
By Kulachada Chaipipat
Advisor to Cofact Thailand
