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POLITICO Digital Bridge: COVID-19 disinformation — Digital divide — Mark Warner
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WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL BRIDGE. I'm Mark Scott, POLITICO's chief tech correspondent. March 11 marks the one-year anniversary since the World Health Organization first called the COVID-19 crisis a pandemic. To date, 2.6 million people have lost their lives. Vaccines are on their way, but stay safe out there.
Buckle up, this week's a good one:
— COVID-19 disinformation is still rampant and getting more political.
— A year into the pandemic, the digital divide between rich and poor is widening.
— U.S. Senator Mark Warner on the need for a Western alliance against Chinese tech.
COVID-19 MISTRUTHS: EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, IT'S THERE
A YEAR INTO THE GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS, and it doesn't take long to find mistruths, weaponized social media content and a growing drumbeat of anti-vaccine disinformation across all the major online platforms. That comes despite Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter all pulling out the stops to rein in this material, including draconian bans that have turned these companies into daily content moderators that seemed outlandish before COVID-19 entered our lives.
I scoured thousands of social media posts and talked to disinformation experts across the European Union and the United States to get a sense of how the threat was evolving. It was not fun. Not only is COVID-19 disinformation well-entrenched online. But it's also taking on an increasingly political slant, even more so than before. "I worry that COVID-19 will have revived the anti-vax community," said Chine Labbe, a researcher at NewsGuard, an analytics firm that tracks online falsehoods. "It's gained a much wider audience."
Let's start out with the basics. Digital falsehoods about coronavirus are everywhere. The narratives, though, have evolved. Last spring, it was all about where the virus came from and who was to blame. Now, the focus is on undermining the vaccine. That includes digitally-astute anti-vax communities pushing their own agenda (often across borders), as well as people incorrectly blaming these injections for side-effects or, in the worst cases, deaths.
"People are suggesting that people are dying in care homes because of the vaccines," Till Eckert, a fact-checker with Correctiv, a German media outlet who works with Facebook to debunk such claims, told me. "There's a lot of vaccine stuff out there. Stuff like it was developed too fast, so it can't work, or that it will make you infertile." More here on how fact-checkers have fared during the crisis.
Part of the problem is structural. I teamed up with academics from King's College London and the University of Amsterdam to track how banned COVID-19 disinformation videos like Plandemic made their way back onto social media via fringe networks like BitChute, a YouTube alternative. Someone uploads the blocked content onto these smaller platforms. Then she posts that link onto, say, Facebook. And hey presto, the banned content is back on the mainstream networks.
"The fact these videos still circulate on Facebook means that they garner significant engagement," said Emilie de Keulenaar, one of the researchers. "It gives these videos extra life." In total, we found banned videos linked to Plandemic; David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist; and Rashid Buttar, an anti-vax campaigner, received, collectively, almost 600,000 forms of engagement like comments and shares on Facebook.
The worrying part (more so than anything above) is that the pandemic is a ripe training ground for anti-establishment political groups to try out new tactics and forge alliances that did not exist before. Conspiracy theories like QAnon have gone global. Far-right campaigners now mimic each other's language around voter fraud and illegal restrictions on personal freedoms. Hopefully, we can now see the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. But those online relationships are here to stay.
MIND THE GAP: THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IS GETTING BIGGER
IF YOU'RE LOOKING for something more upbeat after the previous section, please look away. Twelve months of remote learning and working from home has worsened existing digital inequalities. The poorest of society — on both sides of the Atlantic — are struggling to keep up in a world where Zoom calls, online classrooms and high-speed broadband access have gone from nice-to-haves to basic requirements.
Let's look at the stats. Only one-third of U.S. teachers in high-poverty schools said all of their students had access to the internet at home versus 83 percent of teachers in low-poverty schools, based on research from the RAND Corporation. Equally worryingly was that better internet access was directly linked to students completing more of their online assignments, meaning those without access were now months, if not years, behind their peers.
"Where I worry the most is the youngest kids who aren't getting basic instruction like reading and writing," Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at RAND who conducted the analysis, told me. "When kids can't read by a certain grade [level], it's hard for them to come back. A lot of kids have really fallen behind."
This isn't just about doling out laptops and offering free mobile data — tactics that have sprouted up around the globe. Researchers at the University of Cambridge interviewed principals at several schools in the north of England and found that so-called digital exclusion was intertwined with other socio-economic inequalities like space at home to do remote-learning or parents who are digitally literate. "It was pay for the Wi-Fi or feed the children this month," one teacher told the academics.
"If being online is an important part of being part of U.K. society, being on benefits should not exclude someone from taking part," Gemma Burgess, director of the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, who led that research, told me. "We need a top-down approach that really looks at the wider socioeconomic disadvantages."
It's not just kids who are being left behind. European Commission researchers found white-collar workers (not surprisingly) were more able to work remotely during the pandemic compared to those in more manual jobs (or even in low-skilled professional jobs like data entry). Those people were also more likely to hold onto their jobs, allowing them to race ahead as the public health crisis subsides and more employment was done remotely.
"It's difficult to reach people during the pandemic if they don't have digital skills," said Hannah Holmes, another University of Cambridge academic who's been tracking the COVID-19 digital divide. "A lot of devices have been given out during the crisis. But if you don't have the skills to use those devices like your peers, the digital divide still exists."
DATE FOR THE DIARY: G7 SUMMIT
OFFICIALS ON BOTH sides of the Atlantic are eager to meet in person. The first opportunity to do that is likely to be in mid-June when the G7 countries decamp to Cornwall in southwest England. Joe Biden's team (Tim Wu was just named to the U.S. National Economic Council to work on tech and competition policy) will finally have their feet under the table by the summer. The United Kingdom, too, is eager to trumpet its post-Brexit tech credentials, including the country's own revamp of digital antitrust rules. "I'll be raising these issues with my counterparts in the G7 with a view to promoting competitive, innovative digital markets," Oliver Dowden, the country's digital minister, said last month.
The Commission is also planning to up its transatlantic game with plans underway for Brussels and Washington's digital gurus to gather in or around the G7 meeting, according to several sources. Here's one thing to watch. Europe is eager to promote its "EU-U.S. Trade and Tech Council," or efforts to come up with joint positions on things like global telecom standards and digital trade rules, to others. That may see invitations extended to other democratic countries like Japan and Australia to get in on the action.
WESTERN ALLIANCE AGAINST CHINA
AS CHAIRMAN OF THE U.S. SENATE'S intelligence committee, Mark Warner understands the national security risks the West faces as Beijing flexes its muscles in the digital world. He just co-sponsored legislation to build a partnership of democratic countries (led by the U.S.) to combat China's growing tech influence. I called him in between votes on the U.S. COVID-19 relief bill to understand what that means and how to stop Western countries from undermining each other.
On his views on China: "I was part of the Hank Paulson worldview. That the closer we brought China into the market, into the WTO, they'd become more interconnected and they'd become more like us. We were wrong."
On competing with Beijing on tech: "We, in the West, assumed every tech innovation would be developed in the West … China allows competition domestically until a China champion arises and then that champion is used by China in things like the Belt and Road initiative."
On Trump administration's approach to China: "Trump was directionally right on China. But the execution was dreadfully wrong. If Americans had started in a smarter way on Huawei, it could have happened much sooner."
On competition among democracies: "We're not going to say (a Western tech alliance) will get rid of nation-state competition. But if China puts up $150 billion for investment, we in the West, in aggregate, need to put up the same amount to compete."
WONK OF THE WEEK
WITH A GLOBAL DIGITAL TAX DEAL still a distant reality, we're heading over to the U.S. Treasury this week where Itai Grinberg, a former Georgetown professor, has joined as deputy assistant secretary for multilateral tax office of tax policy (note: these titles are always too long). He's not a newbie to the digital tax debate. He's worked as an outside adviser to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the group of mostly rich countries that's overseeing the current negotiations), as well as in Treasury's Office of the International Tax Counsel during George W. Bush's presidency.
Grinberg will have his work cut out. He's tasked with outlining the U.S. approach to so-called Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 of the OECD's digital tax proposals. That involves allowing non-U.S. countries to grab some of the tax revenue generated by Big Tech giants, as well as setting a minimum corporate tax rate worldwide. Washington wants to apply these rules to all companies, not just digital ones, a stance that has received a cold response from countries like France.
"The digital economy neither can nor should be ring-fenced, and while there should be no special rules for the digital economy that does not resolve the question of whether the international tax system requires reform," he told the University of Oxford's Center for Business Tax back in 2019.
THEY SAID WHAT, NOW?
"Our human-centred approach to digitalization means that technologies and platforms must respect our rights and our values — also when we are online," Margrethe Vestager, the Commission's executive vice-president for a Europe fit for the digital age and competition, when announcing Brussels' plans on March 9 to boost the bloc's digital prowess by the end of the decade. "By 2030, we want at least 20 percent of the world's cutting-edge microelectronics produced in Europe."
— The EU and U.K. have outpaced the U.S. on setting digital rules, putting them in the driving seat of the 21st century, according to Tom Wheeler and Phil Verveer at Harvard Kennedy School.
— We're at a turning point in how the online advertising industry works, and no one has yet to cement their claim, argues Lukasz Olejnik, a privacy and cybersecurity analyst.
— Everyone needs a new transatlantic data agreement, and time is running out, write the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Garrett Workman and Evangelos Razis.
— Despite high-profile calls to use artificial intelligence to combat COVID-19, the technology was barely used for that purpose, based on research from the U.K.'s Center for Data Ethics & Innovation.
— Gaps in how organizations need to disclose their political advertising spend on social media makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine who's spending on what online, say Duke University's J. Scott Babwah Brennen & Matt Perault.
— There's a battle brewing over government access to data, and its implications will be felt across Europe and the U.S., according to Theodore Christakis and Kenneth Propp on Lawfare.
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