https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083
One of the core recommendations is the creation of a "statutory building code", which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms.
The report also suggests social networks should display a correction to every single person who was exposed to misinformation, if independent fact-checkers identify a story as false.
Other suggestions include:
- implementing "circuit breakers" so that newly viral content is temporarily stopped from spreading while it is fact-checked
- forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user
- limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages
- making it illegal to exclude people from content on the basis of race or religion, such as hiding a spare room advert from people of colour
- banning the use of so-called dark patterns - user interfaces designed to confuse or frustrate the user, such as making it hard to delete your account
It also included some proposals that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube already do voluntarily, such as:
- labelling the accounts of state-controlled news organisations
- limiting how many times messages can be forwarded to large groups, as Facebook does on WhatsApp
How about freedom of speech?
In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology.
Who defines what counts as misinformation?
I guess this gets down to something fairly fundamental: do you believe in truth? There are some objectively disprovable things spreading quite rapidly on Facebook right now. For example, that Covid does not exist and that the vaccine is actually to control the minds of people. These are all things that are manifestly untrue, and you can prove that.
Our democratic institutions and public discourse are underpinned by an assumption that we can at least agree on things that are true. Our debates may be about how we respond or what values we apply to a particular problem, but we at least have a common understanding that there are certain things that are manifestly true.
