The Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining the Mishcon Academy Digital Session today. I’ll be your host, Carrie Neale. In a world where Facebook, Meta, is bigger than any state in terms of users, are the old gods dying and is there a new social order rising? And if so, is this liberating us or is this controlling us? We’re here today with Dr Carl Miller and we’re going to be talking about all of this and more. Carl, you are the Research Director of The Centre of Analysis for Social Media at Demos. You are the author of the bestselling book, The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab – great title by the way – and writer for The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. Welcome, Carl and thank you for joining us today.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Hi there Carrie. Hi there everyone. Hello real audience. Hello virtual audience. Thanks for having me.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
How do you see disputes fought out in the information battle space generally?
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
The way I see this essentially is it begins not with the data, not with the technology, not with Russia or China or geopolitics or any state, it just begins with a simple idea and the idea is I think a hugely important one, a very extensible, very elastic one. The idea is basically a way of seeing information as being a theatre of war. It’s something militaries have done and we’ve written about and argued for, it’s something that lots of other organisations have done as well, implicitly, explicitly in part too but the idea is basically that you see joining air, sea, land and space. Information is a kind of like a metaphorical space, I guess, it’s a… and it’s one that warfare happens within, that you manoeuvre within, that you have to dominate, that you have to win with it, in order to win in any kind of conflict and I think that is the kind of like absolute starting point, wherever this conversation goes, whatever you want to discuss and that idea I think is completely changing the world.
Carrie Neale. Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Can you talk to us about the methods that you use and I mean you’ll talk through this a bit more but the semantic, semantic profiling. These are all incredible areas of data.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Carrie, that warms my heart. No one ever talks about methods. I’ve spent the last ten years like building and using and working with people to work on social media research methods. No one’s ever interested in it, so what a brilliant second question that we can dwell on. Thank you.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome, welcome. So I do love data too, so.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Brilliant. Alright. Well, yeah, I mean, so to me this is as exciting as any part of the story, so, so I mean if we jump back kind of ten years, I guess, just for a moment, we both saw the emergence of social medial platforms obviously as huge agents of social change, we knew they were going to change so much, you know, about who we are and why we get up in the morning and the things that we love and the things that we value and who we know, we knew we were going to change all of those things and it was going to rummage around, you know, change what it meant to be human really but on the… but there were also unbelievable new sources of data and information, like they would transform how human beings are studied, how societies studied, you know and all this humanistic disciplines, everything from behavioural science all the way through to social science and, and, and social and sort of cognitive psychology could all suddenly tap into these basically, I think the datafication of social life, you know, everything that we were doing normally, suddenly got turned into digital versions of itself that we could count. But it exploded all the conventional ways we have of research in society, you know you can’t do surveys and polls on millions and millions of Facebook posts or Tweets. So, really for the last ten years that’s what myself and colleagues have been building is, and lots of other people around the world as well now too, basically new ways of handling all of this and it’s been a kind of strange, intricate kind of finessing I think of two different worlds, you know, one the world I mentioned of social science and you know over a century’s memory basically of us trying to work out how to study people and all the ways that we can get that wrong but joining that we’ve had to kind of pull in a whole like muscular suite of like kind of data, science, analytics, you know, stuff that can basically handle data at the vast scale, complexity, you know and contradictory in messiness actually that we find on social media data and it’s been a question of really trying to like scrounge and scrub those two things together to kind of try and create a kind of strange new hybrid discipline which lets us both make sense of all that data at the scale which it has been created but in ways which is kind of sensitive to the social science and the humanities.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
How does civic society identify false news in, in, in this space and online manipulation in parallel to the big tech companies?
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Well, there’s two important points to make here. Firstly, fake new has come to kind of dominate the kind of way in which we describe this whole problem but actually, it’s only a small part of this kind of shadowy tradecraft of information manipulation. You see me groping for the words to describe this, you know, sometimes it’s about information operations, sometimes information warfare, sometimes, sometimes disinformation. It’s strange, there’s not a word which properly encapsulates it but a lot of this has nothing to do with falsehoods. You know, you can make a very distorted picture of the world simply by amplifying some truth over others and we actually look at these operations, that’s often what we see. We see amplification of Daily Mail stories and just the shutting out of other stories and that alone is enough to build a very warped picture of the world but up there there’s also a lot more interaction with the way that people feel rather than how they think. So, often we get this kind of wrongful view that really the problem is that there are these shadowy actives that are kind of lying to you, Carrie, or me and then we form these like, these, these, these ill-founded beliefs about the world and you know, and go out and act on it.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
And share them.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Yeah, yeah, and share them or act on them or vote or whatever but that’s not really what is happing. Instead there’s this kind of whole interaction around how you… the identity that you have, the friends that you have, the values which you hold and kind of more dynamically just your feelings of rage and outrage and sense of wrong in the world and sometimes kind of humour as well and that’s really what these operations exploit, they’re really not lying to people, they’re actually confirming people’s beliefs about the world and then guiding that very, very powerfully in a certain direction.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Under the Online Safety Laws the Government claims that the internet is going to be a safer place for everyone, everyone involved, which obviously is quite a positive view and outlook of it. And those platforms which fail to protect those people will need to answer to the Regulators. Again, quite a big job for the Ofcom there and is this a realistic policy aim firstly? But what are the implications of freedom of expression and the concept of immunity? Will there ever be immunity again and what do you think?
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Before the Online Safety Bill there was basically no democratic control in any way over what the responsibilities companies would be to protect you and me online, all the way through to straight up, you know, badge carrying terrorists using their site. And I was in debates ten years ago where the tech giants would be sending their public affairs spokespeople who were arguing it wasn’t their problem that terrorists were using their platforms.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Wow.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
So, you know, we never thought that we could get there simply by this kind of strange kind of public embarrassment of the tech giants, you know, they would only act in the high profile issues, their act in markets which they you know thought they were more exposed to, they would act in kind of this very reactive way which is basically around you know reputation management. So, we always thought you needed something way more systematic and was basically properly constituted under democratic control, that’s what you needed to really begin to actually change the online world in the ways that you wanted to. So much is in the Online Safety Bill and it’s been very difficult, I mean like disinformation is, my understanding is and won’t be dealt with in primary statutory legislation at all, so that’s going to be kind of follow-up legislation is going to come in to try and handle disinformation down the line but it won’t be handled in what will finally be passed. And of course, yeah, you know the actual definition of ‘online harm’ has been a raging debate across all the communities involved in this for years and years now and there are loads of risks around it as well, I mean I remember The Royal Society recently came forward saying, you know how important it is for scientific development for there to be kind of heretical you know kind of like opinions kind of introduce those debates as well, I mean those on the other side would perhaps say that doesn’t have anything to do with lots of Nazis on YouTube but like, it’s never going to please everyone this Bill but I would much, much rather be in a world where that Bill is in law and we are having debates about how to finesse and change and evolve it than the one that we’ve been in before where we’ve been reliant on a series of huge and very distant companies, with very perverse and mixed incentives to basically shape the worlds where we are increasingly living in. After the kind of Capitol riots in the US and a kind Facebook and Twitter and others responded heavily to that and began to clear off QAnon and kind of the Alt-Right, significant of course Trump was banned, we did see then a kind of… which is continuing, a kind of fracturing of the kind of extremist political mobilisations onto a whole array of new platforms, you know, some of them are kind of like gamer platforms and streamer platforms, some of those are platforms deliberately set up to be a new home for free speech for the Far Right, so that for sure is already happening but then kind of alongside that we’re seeing, and I think this is scarier, the kind of rise of dissent, kind of truly decentralised platforms. You know, these are ones where there is no company at the heart, I mean, you don’t need Facebook the company to create Facebook the network, you really don’t, and for instance there’s a protocol version of Twitter called Mastodon where everyone could basically set up and run their own like mini servers and I think if you are Ofcom, if you are governments, if you are lawyers, what that really means, and maybe I’ll put this everyone to see what they think, is a creeping of the whole of the online world further and further away from the reach of the law, in general, is what I think is happening. You can create a company baked into the blockchain now and smart contracts that has no articles association, no real conventional legal footprint at all, you know, and that could be a company where you invest in stuff, it could be a company where you engage politically, I think the next presidential election is going to see a whole array of these, like funding and kind of engaging in political advertising, there’s you know the Free Julian Assange DAO, so there’s going to be quite a lot of these for activism and that the rub is that none of these are companies, like they’re not registered in Companies House, they’ve got no, they’ve got no legal impersonation as far as I understand it at all so who do you fine? You know, who do you, who do you pick up the phone to, to complain or send a legal letter to? And that is honestly my big worry is that you know the law – and I speak as a non-lawyer – is unbelievably important to kind of like be this thing that we use to control and shape society to try and manage behaviours which we think are wrong, you know be that civil or criminal law, tort law or anything, you know essentially it’s supposed to be restitutive really and to kind of levy costs and risks against behaviours which we think are harmful to society and to individuals within it but one of the big trends, mega trends, that you see across really the whole landscape of technology I think is this moved this drift of both the platforms themselves and the people are that using them away from the reach of the law, you know and the law is becoming kind of quieter and in some cases like kind of actually quite irrelevant.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
How can we bring this to light where people in society can see it?
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Partly I think this is bringing a whole array of new people, including lawyers, into actually kind of building the tools and building the new processes and new understandings to kind of almost like re-weave the law to kind of you know to kind of haul everything back in and like actually information warfare is a great example here. So information warfare has kind of grown up, like many online practices it’s emerged faster than the law really has been able to keep up, so a lot of this isn’t illegal, a lot of this isn’t, I don’t think is necessarily open to criminal prosecution or hasn’t been used and there’s no, very little case law for that and that means that kind of, in terms of our responses to it, they’re very weak, I mean at the moment out ways of responding to information warfare even when kind of geeks like me and my colleagues kind of like build the models and pull it apart, you know and show it to likely be present, is basically you either go to the platforms and you ask them to take it down or you try and teach people, through journalism or through like public digital literacy campaigns how to become a bit more resilient to it but…
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
How do you become more resilient to it? And like how do you spot it? What do we do?
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Well, so my point is, Carrie, really that we can’t expect people to because this is a tradecraft that’s being like developed by intelligence agencies, like we can’t expect to kind of upscale a population in general to stay on top of a constantly changing tradecraft of online manipulation.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Okay, I’m just going to have a quick look at the questions because they are flying in. If fake news is trying to confirm people’s existing beliefs rather than try to change them, what tools does a state have to combat, defend and prevent it?
Dr Carl Miller
Head of Research at Elninio
So, I, I mean as a writer and I’m sure actually as many, many, many people watching this as well that hopefully agree with me, I find the basic idea of information warfare distressing for one main reason, which is that it kind of drains any kind of inherent value out of information itself because in the world of information warfare, writing and culture and the idea of truth and the examination of the human condition, these simply all turn into like instruments with the ulterior motives or behaviour and attitudinal change. Like, and you kind of don’t care what the information is, it’s a vehicle to achieve those things, which is distressing because like I think plenty of us would say that information and all the things which it contains have a value unto itself. So, the, what you really hope is that somehow we can try and declare a peace in information rather than militarising it. I think the kind of like the instinct kneejerk reaction is to say well what we need is liberal democratic states as our own you know more effective form of information warfare, you know, and we need our own rules of engagement, we need our own capabilities and we need to be able to like manoeuvre better in there but I do not think in the long run we are served better by you know increasing the militarisation of it and that means that the kind of response kind of has to be asymmetric, so rather like fighting information warfare with other, with more information warfare, we actually, actually turn to this whole array, which I think we need to build and I think the law is a really important part of that, this whole array of other approaches. I think we need to open up like consumer rights legislation for this, defamation law, libel law, criminal legislation, we might need like a new like digital sedition act to like actually criminalise some of the very worst forms of this, regulation of course as well, information or activism, you know people getting in, like in actually in the face of some of the perpetrators doing this and this sounds strange for a liberal think-tanker to say but honestly, I think actually state power in some cases too, like cyber offensive operations. I would actually like to see our state go more, with more appetite going after some of the kind of underlying infrastructure which allows this kind of stuff to happen.
Carrie Neale, Client Service & Business Development Manager, Mishcon de Reya
Thank you so much for you time today, Carl, it’s been absolutely fantastic. You have been an incredible guest at the Academy today. I much, much appreciate it.
Dr Carl Miller, Head of Research at Elninio
Thank you, Carrie.
The Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions.
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