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(CNN) – US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in good spirits, smiling and jovial when they appeared in front of the press at the annual G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.
It was their first meeting since then-special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and Trump was quick to make light of the situation, pointing a finger at Putin as he pointed out. it indicated not to meddle in the 2020 race.
As reporters gathered for a photo shoot, setting up cameras, Trump joked: “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, right? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.
“We also have, it’s the same,” Putin replied.
The United States has spent decades, billions of dollars and American lives trying to install democracy around the world, but in the last four years, Trump has provided the autocrats with a rhetorical mallet with which to strike one of its most fundamental pillars. : freedom of the press. His memorable term, “fake news,” has emboldened authoritarian and democratic leaders alike to restrict the media in their own countries and target critics perceived with a growing sense of impunity.
Meanwhile, some of those same leaders have given the green light to the deliberate spread of real disinformation: US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia, for example, used fake news to interfere in the 2016 elections.
But the specter of misinformation and foreign electoral interference, which has grown in prominence during the 2020 presidential race, may not be as pernicious as the language now pouring out of the White House itself. Less than two weeks before the election, Trump has promoted unsubstantiated narratives and conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the vote-by-mail and November results, potentially leaving Americans even more vulnerable to further manipulation, warn the US experts.
“Unless [los estadounidenses] Let us mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal problems, we will remain an easy target for any evil actor, be it Russian or Iranian, foreign or national, “writes Nina Jankowicz in” How to Lose the Information War, “her new book on campaigns. of Russian influence and its effect on the democratic project.
For experts like Jankowicz, who have closely followed the president’s war on facts and the undemocratic behavior they inspire, the potential coup de grace could be yet to come: After November, any suggestion that the US election results are false it would have a devastating effect – and not just in the United States.
At a time when authoritarians are working to crack down on internal dissent and roll back fundamental rights, undermining elections at the heart of the global beacon of democracy sets a dangerous precedent, one that will likely be adopted by other leaders trying to uphold their control over power.
Four years of the phenomenon of ‘fake news’
President Trump has said that he came up with the term “fake news.” But the phrase has been in general circulation since the late 1800s, according to Merriam-Webster.
Trump was, however, the first president of the United States to deploy it against his opponents. And for the past four years, he’s carried the phrase into the mainstream, popularizing it as a smear for unfavorable but factual coverage.
According to a database maintained by Stephanie Sugars of the US Press Freedom Tracker, Trump has used the phrase “fake news” nearly 900 times in tweets intended to denigrate the media, insulting private news outlets, discrediting alleged leaks and leakers, and alleging falsehoods. As Election Day approaches, he has redoubled his efforts to attack the fourth estate, research by Sugars has shown.
This has given coverage and legitimacy to other politicians who hope to do the same. The ‘fake news’ has been invoked by dozens of leaders, governments and state media around the world, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Polish President Andrzej Duda, the Former Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis, Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming, and former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, to name just a few.
“There is no doubt that the fact that the president of the United States is using this term to attack the independent media gives an element of license to other politicians elsewhere, including some authoritarian leaders to disguise their own attacks on the independent media and point to the example of the United States, “said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
This can have serious consequences in less democratic contexts, where governments have adopted the term “fake news” to stifle dissent. That’s what a group of journalists from Pakistan, Nicaragua, Tanzania, India and Brazil told Vice President Mike Pence on a trip to the White House last year while in Washington, DC, to receive press freedom awards. from the Commission to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for risking attacks, threats and imprisonment to report.
Patrícia Campos Mello, who has been harassed for her reporting on alleged corruption in Brazil, told Pence that President Jair Bolsonaro had reflected Trump’s rhetoric and attacks on the press, even canceling the government’s subscription to his publication, Folha of S.Paulo, after the president of the United States did the same with the newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post. Other reporters at the event also pointed to the worrying rise in “fake news” legislation used to target critical media.
The governments of Russia, China, Egypt, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan and Cambodia, among others, have used the real problem of disinformation as a pretext to restrict freedom of expression and expand censorship of the media. Between 2017 and 2019, 26 countries passed or proposed laws to restrict online media in the name of fighting “fake news,” according to research by Freedom House, funded by the US government. Some of the laws include criminal or civil penalties for publishing what they consider to be fake news, while others are aimed directly at censoring or removing related content from the Internet.
«[La retórica de las noticias falsas] has emboldened the authoritarians, who are capable of taking even more brutal actions against national opponents than President Trump in the United States, ”said Allie Funk, senior research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, pointing to an escalation in arrests and violence.
Where does the world go from here?
Trump’s promotion of the term “fake news” will have lasting implications for democracy around the world, say academics, press freedom advocates and lawmakers, especially since global laws enacted in the wake of his rhetoric will be difficult to repeal. .
«It has been almost four years equating journalists with fake news. And we have seen that countries and leaders around the world have assumed it, from the obvious ones like China and Russia, Egypt, that they need no excuse for their repressions of press freedom. However, they are happy to have the support of the United States doing the same, through Hungary, Poland, Europe and Latin America, “said Courtney C. Radsch, CPJ’s director of advocacy.
“I doubt that will dissolve in any way once there is a new administration in place. I just don’t see the genie going back to the bottle.
The timeless problem of powerful people trying to mislead the public has been compounded by social media platforms, which allow demonstrably false information to be shared with very large audiences with limited regulation or supervision. The content moderation policies that do exist are often applied unevenly – posts by politicians who break the rules and deceptive political ads are rarely removed, because they are considered to be in the public interest. Addressing that reality requires more transparency on the part of the platforms, specifically, disclosing how their algorithms work, as well as political will to improve the online information ecosystem and make technology companies, which have almost all their headquarters in the United States , be accountable.
However, to date, efforts in the United States to police the platforms have been hampered by the belief that any regulation would affect the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Marietje Schaake, director of international policy at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, says the framing ignores how data collection, algorithmic amplification, artificial intelligence, curation, and virality influence how where speech travels online, including hate speech, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. And that can have a dangerous impact on public discourse.
Facebook and Twitter have started adding fact checks and warning labels to misleading or fake posts by politicians and, in some cases, removing them entirely. But a narrow focus on factually incorrect content ignores what is possibly more dangerous: rhetoric that, over time, undermines faith in democracy itself, says Deborah Brown, senior researcher and digital rights advocate at Human Rights Watch. “They are looking for information that could mislead voters about when or where the poll will take place, or specific charges that can be shown to be untrue. But I think what we have seen with Trump’s strategy is that he is questioning the entire legitimacy of the process, “he said.
So what happens, for example, if the President of the United States uses Twitter on election night and says the results are “bogus”?
Casting doubt on any adverse outcome is a tactic other foreign leaders have deployed for decades, but it would be unprecedented for a sitting US president. “Never before has a leader in the highest office in one of the most powerful democracies in the world, if not the most powerful, has himself taken up the hammer to begin to break the very principles that the country was once proud to uphold,” said Schaake, whose research focuses on disinformation, digital democracy and electoral security.
It doesn’t matter who wins. I think it will also be very difficult to repair, if possible. ”
