THE Scottish Government should appoint a disinformation commissioner to tackle fake news, conspiracy theories and foreign attempts to influence democracy, an SNP MP has said.
Stewart McDonald, spokesman for defence at Westminster, published a paper today setting out his assessment of disinformation activity in Scotland.
He says that disinformation is becoming more sophisticated, and with younger people depending more on online media during the pandemic, they have become particularly vulnerable to fraudulent news.
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It adds that the three main threats are Iran, Russia and China, who have all made attempts to sow disinformation in Scotland in various different ways.
The report warns that due to Iran’s attempts to influence the 2014 independence referendum via an online campaign, similar attempts may intensify in the run-up to the next constitutional vote.
McDonald also added that Russia has been an “active disinformation actor since at least 2014” with “trolls” now attempting to sow doubt over Western-made Covid vaccines while promoting the Sputnik jab.
The report gives a series of recommendations for fighting disinformation in Scotland, including appointing a commissioner, creating a Youth Information Initiative and hosting a Clean Information Summit.
It adds that media organisations should hold open days to counter distrust from the public, the Scottish government should commission an independent audit of the “Scottish information ecosystem” and for public bodies, political parties and faith groups to run disinformation events.
The report states: “Scotland faces a range of disinformation actors who make use of a large and evolving toolbox of techniques to influence and corrupt the Scottish information ecosystem.
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“There is no panacea for this problem.”
It adds: “However, homegrown and domestic disinformation crises must not be discounted: conspiracy theories like QAnon or those related to the Covid-19 pandemic pose just as severe a threat to our national security and illustrate the urgent need to build national information resilience.”
The paper goes into great detail about foreign interference in the Scottish independence referendum and states that Russia has been, “ an active disinformation
actor in Scotland since at least 2014. Using a variety of techniques, including foreign
broadcast networks and interference in electoral events, Russia has sought to push Kremlin endorsed narratives into the Scottish public sphere”.
It adds that as the UK government has not made a statement on the scale of this interference a “significant” proportion of Scottish voters have “concluded that their elections are not wholly free and fair”.
McDonald said that a “national strategy” to tackle disinformation is needed, and cited Finland, Sweden and Singapore’s policies to create greater levels of trust in their political systems and media.
He said: “The pandemic has brought into sharp focus why this issue is of real importance. Disinformation, both before and during the vaccine campaign, has been weaponised at levels nobody imagined.
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“Clear public health messaging really matters when you are trying to save lives by communicating facts, and there is no shortage of people who want to distort those facts and disrupt our ability, as an open society, to communicate them clearly.
“As we start to both recover and learn from the pandemic, it is incredibly important that lessons around how we counter-disinformation is part of that learning process.
“We cannot go into the next pandemic – and there will be another in the future – with the same toolkit as we’ve used this time round. Disinformation campaigns are always evolving to become more sophisticated and better resourced, and so too must our own counter-disinformation strategy.
"I hope this report encourages some deep and cross-party thinking on the issue, and encourages politicians and civil society groups to work together and help Scotland build robust information resilience that is fit for the modern age."
You can read the full report here.
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