Taming the Digital Leviathan: Advancing the "Right to Truth" in the Age of Deepfakes and Disinformation

Introduction

Democracy is dead. Long live Digital Democracy! This phrase perhaps sums up the predicament that liberal democracies are going through around the world. Web 2.0 has already altered democratic praxis across the globe in irredeemable ways. Web 3.0, with the advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, continues to take it to uncharted territory. Democracies are nothing short of ‘hacked’ by technologies that find newer ways to alienate, divide and shape our opinions, choices, and preferences even without us knowing (Schia & Gjesvik, 2020). The digital divide does not simply mean the unavailability of access to digital technology and the internet in the modern context. The new ‘digital divide’ is perpetuated by social media entities and corporations that create bubble filters, echo chambers, bot-driven agenda setting and narrative building that decide what is best for us, on behalf of us. In 2014, Facebook acknowledged that it was involved in an ‘emotional contagion’ experiment where users were fed two sets of posts, one depressing and the other cheerful, to obtain their emotional response (Selinger & Hartzog, 2015). Such blatant transgressions, all under the garb of product testing, are nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen.

There can be no doubt that social media has become the hotbed of disinformation and misinformation, with social media platforms choosing profit over principle, as evident through the outright scandals and unethical/illegal practices that emerged therefrom (Confessore, 2018; Vallinsky et al., 2018; and Wong, 2021). Yet all these were shrugged off as quickly and quietly as they came, except for pecuniary penalties levied in certain cases (Stoller, 2021). Rebranding, remarketing, and reinventing seem to be the mantra, with Google branching out from ‘Alphabet’, Facebook becoming ‘Meta’, and Twitter becoming ‘X’. The names may have changed, but the underlying practices remained unchanged (Yohn, 2021). The attention economy is reigning supreme, and social media platforms are solely concerned with maximising user engagement by any means necessary (Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021).

Maximising engagement leads to greater profits. In this endeavour to grab the eyeballs, objectivity is diluted, sleaze and shock sell, negativity and toxicity fester, click-baiting becomes the order of the day, and as a result, the truth becomes the single biggest causality (Duncombe, 2020; Kim et al., 2021; and Khan et al., 2019). Truth and objectivity lie at the heart of democratic discourse, a promise that everyone has an equal and fair say in decision-making and representation. An idea of one-man-one-vote. The freedom to freely voice one’s opinion, to protest and deliberate and, if needed, to dissent and democratically disrupt. Social media-led digital technology has fractured it in more ways than one, skewing the power scale to the might of the technologically sound and economically invested. Consent is constructed, dissent is diluted, and vice versa, utilising sophisticated technologies designed to fool and mislead the general public (Ayolov, 2023).

Internet 3.0 technologies and developments such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, deepfakes, etc., pose an ‘existential threat’ to democracy on an unprecedented scale and level. Particularly, ‘deepfakes’ add to the public confusion and policymakers’ woe, creating unforeseen implications for democratic governance worldwide. World leaders now utilise and deploy social media handles to announce policy decisions, governmental stands, international relations and even national/international security matters (Adesina, 2017). The mischief and dangers that could be occasioned by the ‘deepfakes’ of political leaders are deeply disturbing. There have been a few instances of global political leaders falling prey to such ‘fake news’ and ‘fake content’ (Goldman, 2016). Moreover, there is an emerging pattern of ‘deepfakes’ that is causing serious political and governmental upheaval with reputational damage, disinformation, and even unsuccessful military coups occasioned in the states of Malaysia, Belgium and Gabon, respectively (Puutio & Timis, 2020).