New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has delivered the highly regarded Harvard Commencement address, calling out social media as a threat to modern day democracy.

She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the university.

The Commencement is steeped in history with Ardern’s predecessors including Winston Churchill, JFK, Angela Merkel — and topically for today’s speech — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Capping off her day, Ardern confirmed to media afterwards that she would meet US President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time).

She invoked the memory of the late Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim country, and to give birth while in office with Ardern being the second.

Seven months after the two women met Bhutto was assassinated, Ardern said.

‘Path carved still relevant’
“The path she carved as a woman feels as relevant today as it was decades ago, and so too is the message she shared here.

“She said part way through her speech in 1989 the following: ‘We must realise that democracy… can be fragile’.

“… while the reasons that gave rise for her words then were vastly different, they still ring true. Democracy can be fragile.”

Ardern told her audience of thousands that because of the speed of social media, disinformation is creating an ever increasing risk.

Watch the address

The Harvard Commencement address.    Video: RNZ News

“Social media platforms were born offering the promise of connection and reconnection. We logged on in our billions, forming tribes and subtribes.”

While it started as a place to experience “new ways of thinking and to celebrate our difference” it was now often used for neither of those things, she said.

However, just two days after the massacre in a school in Texas that saw 19 students and two teachers killed, the biggest response she got from the audience was when she referred to changes to firearms law.

Standing ovation over guns stance
She received a standing ovation when she said the government had succeeded in banning military style semi-automatics and assault rifles, in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks.

“On the 15th of March 2019, 51 people were killed in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The entire brutal act was livestreamed on social media. The royal commission that followed found that the terrorist responsible was radicalised online,” she said.

“In the aftermath of New Zealand’s experience, we felt a sense of responsibility. We knew we needed significant gun reform, and so that is what we did.”

She went on to say that if genuine solutions were to be found to the issue of violent extremism online, “it would take government, civil society and the tech companies themselves to change the landscape. The result was the Christchurch Call to Action.

“And while much has changed as a result, important things haven’t.”

Ardern called on social media companies to recognise their power and act on it and acknowledge the role they play in shaping online environments.

“That algorithmic processes make choices and decisions for us — what we see and where we are directed — and that at best this means the user experience is personalised and at worst it means it can be radicalised.

‘Pressing and urgent need’
“It means, that there is a pressing and urgent need for responsible algorithm development and deployment.”

She said the forums were available for the tech companies to work alongside society and governments to find solutions to the issues.

She encouraged her audience to realise that their individual actions were also important.

“In a disinformation age, we need to learn to analyse and critique information. That doesn’t mean teaching ‘mistrust’, but rather as my old history teacher, Mr Fountain extolled: ‘to understand the limitations of a single piece of information, and that there is always a range of perspectives on events and decisions’.”

While the prime minister’s US trip was planned around the Harvard Commencement, there is a trade and tourism focus, but also a chance to check in with some of the tech giants at whom she delivered her message, in particular around the Christchurch Call, during the next few days.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Journalist and publisher Maria Ressa has called on tech and social media giants to practise “enlightened self-interest” amid a global call for platforms to step up in the fight against disinformation.

“The world that you’ve created has already shown that we must change it. I continue to appeal for enlightened self-interest,” said Ressa, chief executive and founder of Rappler, in an online lecture for the Facebook and the Big Lie series.

Ressa, a veteran journalist and Nobel Peace laureate who will be receiving the award this Friday, has been studying, reporting on, and sounding the alarm against the use of social media platforms as a means to spread lies and hate.

The Rappler boss herself has been the subject of harassment online and of legal cases against her in the Philippines.

Platforms like Facebook, said Ressa, give the same weight on posts, whether it is a lie or a fact, in a bid to increase user engagement.

While it has meant more revenue for the platforms, it also means that posts that spark emotion — whether or not they are based on fact — gain the most traction online.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen had earlier revealed that the algorithm for instances, puts weight on “angry” reactions more than regular likes.

‘Moderate the greed’
“In the Philippines, we say ‘moderate the greed.’ [These platforms] are part of our future, that’s why we’re partners,” she explained.

The stakes are even higher in countries like the Philippines, which will be electing a new president in May 2022.

“Why we must fight disinformation. It weakens, and ultimately subverts, democracy, by undermining the factual basis of reality, by denying the standards of truth.”

— #FightDisinfo

“We cannot not do anything because we in the Philippines have elections on May 9. If we do not have integrity of facts, we won’t have integrity of elections,” warned Ressa.

Platforms, after all, are anything but clueless and helpless.

Facebook, for instance, put more weight on “news ecosystem quality” or NEQ after employees found that election-related information were spreading on the platform in the days following the US elections in 2021.

The NEQ, according to The New York Times, is a “secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.”

The lies asserted that the elections were rigged and that Donald Trump, then US president, was the true winner.

The ‘big lie’ persists
he “big lie,” as it has since been called, persists to this day.

Ressa said she woud be asking Facebook “behind the scenes and in front,” via Rappler’s partnerships, to turn up the NEQ locally.

Increasing the weight of the NEQ, at least in the US, meant that for a while, mainstream media accounts — The New York Times, CNN, and NPR — were more prominent on the Facebook feed than hyperpartisan pages.

“The foundational problem is that facts and lies are treated equally, which is what has poisoned the information ecosystem,” added Ressa.

Duterte, who won the 2016 elections by a wide margin in a plurality, is among the first national candidates to effectively use social media in a Philippine election.

Social media hasn’t just changed how regular citizens act and candidates campaign, it has also changed sitting leaders’ tactics.

“Leaders in the past that would take over, their first challenge is always how to unite people. Now, with social media because of the incentive schemes, we’re seeing leaders awarded if they divide,” said Ressa.

More manipulation tools
“Illiberal governments have gotten more tools to manipulate people,” she added. Rappler investigations later found that pro-Duterte networks used fake accounts to spread lies and disinformation well into his term as president.

Rappler started out as a Facebook page in mid-2011 and has since grown to be among the leading news sites in the Philippines. The news organisation faces at least seven active pending cases before different courts in the Philippines.

These are on top of online attacks over its reporting on the Duterte administration, including its bloody “war on drugs” and allegations of corruption among the President’s allies.

Ressa and a former researcher were convicted in June 2020 for a cyber libel law that hadn’t even been legislated when the article first came out.

Ressa is the first Filipino individual awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize and is the only woman in this year’s roster of laureates.

Ressa won the Peace Prize alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.

They won the prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

Republished from Rappler with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As covid-19 spreads around the world, it can be daunting keeping up with the information. For RNZ, the news organisation’s responsibility is to give you verified, up to the minute, trustworthy information to help you make decisions about your lives and your health. Questions will also be asked of officials and decision makers about how they are responding to the virus. The aim is to keep you informed.

New Zealand’s Chief Censor says the country has an opportunity to be leading the world in fighting against covid-19 disinformation online.

Nasty rumours, inaccurate advice and bullying has circulated through social media following the second wave of infections.

Health Minister Chris Hipkins gave those responsible a serve at the 1pm briefing yesterday after a racist and misogynist rumour about a woman breaking into an isolation facility had done the rounds.

He said it had reached a “new and concerning level”, and was “not only was it harmful and dangerous, it was totally and utterly wrong”.

But other than a good telling off, the government was limited in what action it could take to starve the online world of fake news.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are just some of the places where information is shared, but the big platforms seem to do little to moderate.

Chief Censor David Shanks said Sweden had been teaching kids for nearly a decade how to both spot and verify misinformation.

World-leading response
He said New Zealand was world-leading with its response to the extremists using the internet as a weapon following the mosque shootings.

“The Christchurch Call was one of the first moves led out which really brought an integrated, transnational, governmental and industry accord in thinking about how we could deal with the weaponisation of the internet in terms of the spread of violent extremist material.”

And similar leadership from New Zealand could also help stop the spread of covid-19 misinformation, Shanks said.

“In a way some of the extreme disinformation and conspiracy theories could be seen as the next layer out from that and is, in a way, connected with violent extremism when you trace through to the origins of some of this material.

“I think New Zealand can and should have a role in leading some thinking about how we can deal with this sort of issue,” Shanks said.

Social media commentator Anna Rawhiti-Connell said the second wave of the coronavirus had split the online community, increasing both the attacks and the severity of them.

“Part of that is around just fatigue, people are weary and they are tired.

‘A lot of uncertainty’
“There’s a lot of uncertainty and that will naturally create a splintering kind of effect.”

Patriotism was a very big part of the last conquering of covid, she said.

“I think we have splinted far more than we did around that initial lockdown.

“We kind of got through a lot of that on the sort of spirit and smell of a patriotic oily rag, and this time around, I don’t know if that’s quite as strong, and so that does breed a much more fractious kind of environment.”

Rawhiti-Connell said throughout the second outbreak there was lots of racial overtones and people looking for something to blame.

Indigenous Rights advocate Tina Ngata said Māori were particularly vulnerable to the disinformation because of a deep-rooted distrust of the government and its failure to uphold treaty obligations.

“Some of the concerns are very valid and they don’t come from nowhere, they generally find fertile soil where there is disenfranchisement,” she said.

“That’s why we see it over in the United States, the working class are really engaged in some of these conspiracy theories and that’s because they do feel let down by the system.

“And there are whole communities that feel let down by the system here and Aotearoa as well.”

Honouring the Treaty in a pandemic
Ngata said the Māori pandemic response group Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā wanted to be more involved in the decision making and felt the decisions that were made were not as representative as they could have been.

“This is an opportunity for the government to reflect on why it’s picked up so well here in Aotearoa and what has been the government’s role in that disenfranchisement and the lack of trust because, you know, similar to any relationship, if the trust is in place, it doesn’t really matter what other people say.”

She said the government needed to acknowledge the role of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi within the pandemic.

“There are some issues that feed into our trust relationships in the past and a lot of that, for Māori in particular, comes back to Treaty violations.

“Making sure that Te Tiriti is centred and upheld and honoured and not looked at as a ‘nice to have’ but looked at as a constitutional underpinning for all of our decisions as a nation moving ahead,” Ngata said.

Tech commentator Paul Brislen was alarmed at how many people relied solely on social media for their news when these platforms were not policed in the same way the mainstream media was.

“Social media outlets, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, all the rest of them, they simply refuse to accept that they are publishers of the content that is shared as widely as it is.

“They claim to be a platform totally neutral, they have no control over it.

“Because the government buys into that that really gives them nowhere to go in terms of enforcement of decency or any of the things that aren’t in law but are in common practice that we get with professional media.”

Brislen said without someone to hold them accountable, the government did not have a leg to stand on.

Instagram, however, has taken some action. It has teams actively removing posts that breached the covid-19 policy.

“We remove content that could lead to imminent harm, and we’ve applied warning labels to millions of pieces of misinformation.

“Conspiracies around the virus continue to be fact-checked by our partners around the world, and we block vaccine-related hashtags which contain known misinformation to reduce its visibility on Instagram.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Michael Andrew

Religion and race-based attacks will continue as a result of the rise of online hate speech, says a leading New Zealand academic.

Professor Paul Spoonley, pro vice-chancellor of Massey University, told Asia Pacific Report that online hate speech “provides an enabling environment which green lights racial and religious vilification”.

He was responding to a media focus on racism and Islamophobia in news media this week, following last Friday’s massacre in which 50 people were killed by a right-wing terrorist.

READ MORE: Hate speech – we need to understand the damage it does

“It provides unfiltered ideas and arguments for those who are pliable and interested. And it tells others what you have done and got away with,” said Dr Spoonley, who gave a public lecture on the topic at the National Library on Tuesday.

Prior to the Christchurch attack, the accused terrorist was active on far-right online forums that promoted anti-Islamic sentiment.

-Partners-

In a recent article published by the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Spoonley wrote that he had personally encountered such hate speech.

Hateful comments
“I looked at what some New Zealanders were saying online. It did not take long to discover the presence of hateful and anti-Muslim comments.

“It would be wrong to characterise these views and comments as widespread, but New Zealand was certainly not exempt from Islamophobia.”

Recent research reports similar findings. According to a 2018 Netsafe survey of adult New Zealanders, 30 percent of participants had encountered online hate speech targeting someone else while 11 percent of all New Zealanders had been personally targeted themselves.

Religion was the most common reason for the abuse, followed closely by race and ethnicity.

While the internet has enabled such abuse to be shared more effectively, some argue that hate speech is an inherent issue in New Zealand society and has been since the days of early colonisation.

“This country was founded on hate speech,” said Associate Professor Camille Nakhid, an AUT sociologist and chair of the PMC advisory board.

“I suppose they didn’t call it hate speech at the time, but the taking of Maori land, the denigration of people considered worthless, the marginalisation of their customs through laws and media, I’m still struggling to think why New Zealanders cannot see the correlation.”

Racism unchecked
A researcher of marginalised and minority groups, Dr Nakhid said the attacks such as the mosque ones in Christchurch were an inevitable result of the racism that went unchecked in New Zealand society.

“We saw the danger of hate speech on Friday. If you look at what New Zealand media personalities have said about migrants and refugees, this is what it would lead to.”

There has been a number of recent controversies involving on-air racism, most notably when Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan referred to Pacific countries as leeches.

In the wake of Friday’s massacre there has been a public outcry calling for the regulation and censorship of such speech in order to prevent further race and religion-based attacks.

However, AUT professor of history Paul Moon said that while a desire for censorship was an instinctive response to hate-based events, it would not address the root cause of the problem.

“Censorship would be fruitless as a means of prevention because it addresses only a small part of the symptom, rather than the underlying cause” he said.

“The problem of socially-conditioned hatred is so much larger and more intricate than the capacity of any sort of censorship to control it.”

Isolation dangerous
While he said that there was cause to re-evaluate the limits of free speech in New Zealand, stifling speech could often create a dangerous climate of isolation.

“What the Christchurch killer’s manifesto revealed was a profound degree of ignorance, isolation, and self-loathing,” he said.

“It was precisely a lack of exchange of ideas with the wider community that contributed to such a warped and manifestly dangerous view of the world.”

While the national grief has been palpable in the days following the massacre, the majority of the public has galvanised around New Zealand’s Muslim community, offering support, laying flowers at mosques and holding vigils of solidarity.

This, said Dr Moon, was the best way to counter hate speech.

“Participation, learning, and sharing are among the best antidotes to isolation, and the sort of hatred that can ferment from such social separation.”

Michael Andrew is the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project contributing editor.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz