If there is one issue that is considered global today, it is the impact of online disinformation, hate speech and Artificial Intelligence. The UN, which has expressed enormous concern about what it has called an “existential threat”, has just released a statement from New York a coordinated international framework for action to address it“Threats to the integrity of information are not new, but they are proliferating and expanding at an unprecedented speed on digital platforms, supercharged by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies,” said António Guterres at the end of June.
However, from Salvador de Bahía, in northeastern Brazil, a woman is leading the same fight but from the perspective of countries in the global south and is pointing out the inequalities in this public debate. Nina Santos is the director of Aláfia Lab and coordinator of Desinformantea research laboratory on the impacts of the digital world, online racism and disinformation processes. “The platforms are treating us citizens of the global south as second-class citizens. We cannot accept that,” she says, whose job, she clarifies, is not fact-checking. “We do not want to tackle disinformation one by one, we believe that we must do it en bloc, as a structural problem.”
Ask. What is the source of this inequality and second-class treatment you speak of?
Answer. The first problem is that when we talk about social media, about artificial intelligence in general, these are technologies that are made in the United States, and now also in China. And these technologies are not neutral, they bring with them a vision of the world, a way of imagining social relations, the future and democracy. So, the rules of what is valid or not valid in public debate in countries like Brazil, or any other in Latin America and Africa, for example, are set, not by the societies of these countries, but by the platforms that privately dictate what can be done in online conversations, which are today completely central to all social processes.
P. Among them the political processes…
A. We talk about political processes, elections, decision-making, but the truth is that these platforms are central to our relationships with friends, family, they determine the way we sell, the way we buy. (In the global south) not only do we not have our own platforms, but we are not even disputing the way the current ones are built. A second step, as a consequence of this, is that these companies are fighting very hard against local regulations (as in the case of Brazil). The only region that has managed to do so in a more structural way so far is the European Union.
P. How does the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) make the phenomenon more complex?
R. AI must be seen as a phenomenon that is closely integrated into social media platforms. Much of the impact it can have on society is related to how this content will circulate on social media or messaging apps. We are living in a very complex time because AI technologies are getting very close to reality and make the possibility of falsifying content much broader. It is more than urgent to have national or transnational regulations for the use of these technologies, which I do not think should be seen only from the negative side.
P. How does the absence of regulation in countries of the global south deepen inequality?
R. Not having regulations is very bad, but it is even worse when Europe has regulations and Latin America does not, because platforms make decisions to comply with European legislation but do not promote the same rights in other parts of the world. One example is data access policies. Two years ago we had much more access to data in Latin America than we do now.
P. Brazil tried to regulate these platforms, why did it fail?
R. It was attempted strongly, even with the support of the Executive and part of the Legislature, but the lobby of digital platforms was able to put a limit. The Brazilian experience has shown us that we need social support, that the discussion is visible. People are clear that we need regulations, but from there to mobilizing to support this process is one thing.
P. The case of Brazil also shows the role of platforms in political processes.
R. We often talk about how conversations on platforms bring disinformation, hate speech, and can provide more visibility for the far-right political field, compared to the left. But in addition to the conversations on the platform, the fact of having one and owning one also makes these people political actors. What we saw a few months ago when Elon Musk said he would not respect a decision of the Brazilian Supreme Court is clear proof of this.
P. And what can be done to limit the role that platforms play?
R. The solution is not to go back to what we had before, but to find another way of living in a digital society. That is the great transformation that lies ahead. Today, digital is part of our lives. We are constantly using a mobile phone that has social networks, that even has artificial intelligence, because we often think of AI as a technology for creating content, for deepfakes And it is all of that, but it is also a technology for content recommendation and filtering processes. Today it is more complex because it is much more integrated into our daily lives; but, on the other hand, with all this integration, we also have a greater interest and knowledge about what happens online.
P. How to use that interest?
R. With all this greater knowledge, we can now think about what we want from a democracy in the digital age. I think that is the big question that we have to answer and work to build because we remain locked in this discussion about what we have today. Yes, we have to discuss regulation, self-regulation, co-regulation, but we also have to think beyond that and see what we can propose as a democratic society in the digital age.
P. Any examples that are being considered as digital democracy?
R. I don’t see anything very structured. That’s why there is a need to build an information agenda starting from the South, from our reality, precisely now that the idea of information integrity is a topic of the moment. This is a new term that was created, obviously from the United States and Europe, and that is being widely used by international organizations. The UN has just published the global principles for information integrity that will be discussed at the Summit of the Future, in September, in New York.
P. How are countries in the global south responding to the discussion on principles?
R. Again, the problem is that these principles and the idea of information integrity are conceived from a social reality that is not ours, they are not social realities of countries that were colonized, that had enslaved people, that have enormous social inequality, that are recent democracies, sometimes stable.
P. Who is leading that agenda outside the United States and Europe?
R. Everything is very fragmented and there are different leaderships. However, Brazil is now the president of the G20 and is proposing the agenda of information integrity to the rest of the countries. It therefore has a role in putting these issues of information integrity, of fighting disinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories online in different circles of international discussion. But I also see that Mexico has many discussions around the relationship between digital and the protection of vulnerable or historically vulnerable groups such as women and indigenous groups. Argentina, for now, with the recent elections, is not experiencing a time of much construction of alternatives but rather of discussion. And if we talk about Africa, we see experiences such as that of Kenya where they proceed against technology companies for promoting harmful discourse during elections; the same as in India. There are examples, the problem is that we still do not have an integration that gives us strength to confront this discourse that comes from the countries of the north.
P. You study the digital environment through blogs. Do you think that disinformation and hate speech are worse today?
R. Many times, when we look at the situation, we are tempted to think that things were much better before, but in my view that is not true. In Brazil, for example, in the 90s and early 2000s there was a very strong struggle for the democratization of the media, a process of denouncing that these were and still are very concentrated in a few families, with little diversity in terms of gender, race, and political position. In other words, we also had a very complicated communication situation. We cannot think that if Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok were simply eliminated, we would be much better off today because that is not true.
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