Those that know me will understand why I might shudder at reading the BBC report claiming that the electoral commission will not be able to police the expected explosion in spoof videos at the next election.
I think politicians can probably live with it, but there is a slightly more worrying matter.
Mark Pack of Lib Dem fame has recently highlighted the problem of electoral imprints when it comes to the internet and, in particular, social networking sites like Facebook.
As Mark says:
“….the general principles of election imprints on printed items are clear and widely followed, which is why you frequently see leaflets with wording such as “Printed, published and promoted by Mark Pack on behalf of William Woodings (Liberal Democrats), both at 17 Lever Arch View, London, N1 3AH”.
“However, it’s far from clear how these rules should be applied to the online world. The question of emails and websites is moderately straightforward, in that they have space for a full imprint and you can interpret the “printer” required on leaflets to mean the computer firm that hosts the website or provided the email server used to send messages.
“It becomes less straightforward for social networking services, where it is often either hard to find somewhere to put suitable information (e.g. is putting an “imprint” on the non-default tab on a Facebook page acceptable?) or where there are problems over the length of messages involved (e.g. you can’t really expect a full imprint in each tweet).”
The good news is that the law allows the Secretary of State to take powers that will allow rules to be drawn up to clarify what should be done with imprints in the digital space. The bad news is that six years after the electoral commission pointed out the problem, the powers have still not been used.
I’m going to write to Jack Straw to ask him to sort it out. It strikes me that between us, we could knock up a set of guidelines quite quickly. I nominate Mark to get the ball rolling with a draft. Anyone else got ideas?
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Reading to the end of the report by the BBC, we have:
[quote]
An Electoral Commission spokesman said it had no plans to police internet material during the general election campaign.
“There is nothing in electoral legislation that would cover that kind of stuff. Our job is to provide guidance for those people taking part in an election and to help them stay within the law.”
But he makes clear that complaints about potentially defamatory material, under electoral laws, remain a matter for the police and that cases will be investigated.
[unquote]
Oh, really?
I’d have expected any plod told about defamatory material to reply, “Sorry sir, that’s a civil matter!” and refuse to have anything to do with it, but they may have a different approach if one is Jack Straw or if they can use some of their anti-terrorism powers.
Darn, you’ve landed me with some homework
But the idea of a collaborative draft is a good one. I’ll knock something up in the next few days, though possibly after Lib Dem conference is out the way.
Apparently, Michael Wills has ruled it out this week: http://digs.by/MiE
Is that the right approach? I can’t decide.
I’m going to write to Jack Straw to ask him to sort it out. It strikes me that between us, we could knock up a set of guidelines quite quickly. I nominate Mark to get the ball rolling with a draft. Anyone else got ideas?
I take a pessimistic view of this…
One of the issues that we face at the moment, indeed something that strikes to the heart of rather a lot of areas, is that policing internet, online or otherwise electronic information in the same way as printed material is massively problematic.
Looking purely on the surface it seems easy enough to validate the origin of any online content. You can, even on social sites, see who the sender or poster is. Usually this is used to assess the validity or trustworthiness of the the source. With websites you can check the whois information, with email you can do the same for the sender.
Essentially it would be easy for any person who has an issue with a given piece of electoral material to report it (because as we have already established, there aren’t the resources to do this available to the electoral commission, indeed it would probably be a full time job for larger government departments dedicated to communications…).
The flip side of course is that all of that information and trust can be established in a manner that is utterly unverifiable. Email addresses can be easily spoofed (ignoring signing for a moment), whois entries can be protected, social sites can be duped.
More importantly, once any given piece of information or media is out on the web, it is on its own, if it is interesting or inflammatory (or false but persuasive…) it will likely be reproduced, resent, reposted and generally become utterly untraceable and uncontrollable.
Given that it is perfectly possible to produce and disseminate high quality information (or disinformation) via the web, in an untraceable way and that it is easy to make it look trustworthy, or to generate trust for a source, it becomes impossible to pursue or prosecute violations where the intent is to avoid it.
In short, whilst it is perfectly possible to require an imprint, for certain information, whether from official or more likely unofficial supporters it would be easy to ignore such a requirement and see great benefits to the party it is being done for.
Looking at the US election, some of the emails, videos and other information that was generated and widely disseminated it is clear that people feel that using on-line resources as a channel to spread misinformation is useful, moreover that misinformation has found its way into the mainstream discourse because even media organisations are not immune from following up on sufficiently interesting, yet hard to source information.
So, I do think that requirements should be drawn up, emails should have a source reference, parties should have a list of the outlets that they deem official (including member blogs and social media users and so on) such information should be readily available, but I doubt it would resolve any of the major issues we have seen in other countries.
Of course electoral issues aren’t the only ones we face, indeed a lot of the legislative agenda regarding the internet and data, much of it seen as negative is essentially simply plugging the gaps in the holes that the internet and technology have opened.
OK, sorry for the ramble, I have been up for rather a long time…
Agreed. Thinking about this a bit more and in brief twitter conversation with Mark, it strikes me that the best approach should be to get the political parties to sign up to a set of guiding principles.
This will allow the parties to help ensure that their candidates behave sensibly whilst letting the wilder elements of the ‘net to retain their right to rip us to shreds. That’s just the way it’s going to be and there’s no sense in politicians worrying about it.
Mark is very kindly drafting something that can get the ball rolling.
I think I will keep an eye on Marks blog and see what he comes up with. It will be interesting to see what someone with close ties to the ORG has on the subject and if it is open, I might find time to contribute. It is one of those wonderfully complex, really important yet oft overlooked areas that I try to keep an eye on…
Whether a set of guiding principles is sufficient to protect the UK electoral process from some potentially very dangerous influences is somewhat of a different question though. A democratic system requires informed voters after all, deliberately misinformed or misled voters on the other hand…
(On other election issues, I wonder what’s going to happen regarding the use of “MP” in domain names/twitter accounts &c once the writs have been issued.)
Adam raises a good point – semi-permanent online communications by MPs that use the title “mp” are much more of a problem under current law.
The imprint thing just isn’t a problem. As I understand it the purpose of an imprint relates to two areas – elections expenses, and complaints. There’s no cost issue with twitter/facebook/youtube etc and presumably anything published online can be traced to a specific IP address in the small number of cases where it’s not obvious where it’s come from.
Maybe we should think about extending TheStraightChoice to let people submit online material too?
Interesting issue.
For Twitter, the most sensible thing would be that any candidate has a link on their bio with to some page containing the full imprint and makes clear that they are a candidate. I would have thought the same would be appropriate for facebook messages etc.
Lots of good ideas, thank you.
Richard – I think that’s an inspired ideas for the TheStraightChoice. It might trim the excesses of some over-exuberant campaigners and will certainly provide an important record of the election. I don’t know anywhere else thinking about archiving online stuff.
Just to take this point raised by tim f:
“There’s no cost issue with twitter/facebook/youtube etc and presumably anything published online can be traced to a specific IP address in the small number of cases where it’s not obvious where it’s come from.”
There is a cost issues associated with the production and maintenance of social media, its just the delivery that is free, although that said I’m not sure how or if it needs to be quantified. Producing a decent youtube equivalent of a party political broadcast is still expensive, although there aren’t any broadcast costs associated with it.
The second point, that a specific IP address is associated with content is obviously true, however that IP address can only tell you who hasn’t produced the content (you won’t be able to tell who has if they don’t want you to).
Moreover things like emails can be spoofed to the point where an ‘official’ email is indistinguishable from an ‘unofficial’ one to most people. If I wanted to send a few thousand people an email from tomwatson@parliament.uk (Assuming that is the right format, the soil association seem to think it is…), I could. I could even spoof the IP address that the mail appeared to originate from (although it wouldn’t quite look right to the initiated as the mail wouldn’t necessarily be routed through the right mail servers).
In short there are three issues, the first being able to establish whether something is from an official source (which for real information shouldn’t be too hard). The second is being able to spot what isn’t official, again as long as no one is trying to dupe you that shouldn’t be too hard either. The last is dealing with information that intentionally misleads, that is potentially very difficult. Verification of an official looking piece of information appearing to come from an official source is almost impossible.
Of course the last element is hardly new, it is perfectly possible for me to go and print a party newsletter and distribute it now (although harder to make a fake video or radio message and have it broadcast…) but that costs money and probably involves more than just me to produce and distribute.
Then again none of that is terribly relevant to the initial question of having some rules in place for official election related political media, indeed in the case of intentionally misleading and ‘spoofed’ information it is probably a matter for the police and laws probably exist to prevent it. It is just very hard to detect, hard to police and most importantly could have a major impact in the short period in the run up to an election.
Here’s my first stab at overall what such rules would cover: http://bit.ly/O6Okk Comments etc most welcome
[...] that disagreement is to demonstrate an example of what the rules would say. Tom Watson MP has also commented: “Thinking about this a bit more and in brief twitter conversation with Mark, it strikes me that [...]
The first reason there’s no regulation of the internet with regards to electoral politics is that — in spite of best and worst efforts — the electoral effect of anything on the internet has been entirely negligeable and unobservable. I should know.
Until some effects (real or imagined) are experienced by the political class, there is nothing to regulate.
The second reason it’s not going to be regulated is that if something is eventually made to work, it’s more than likely to be by one of the main parties — not by some kids making spoof videos in their bedroom.
You don’t want to risk banning something that turns out to be rather useful to the party, like selling peerages for secret cash donations.
[...] that the government had decided not to take powers that might oblige political parties to use electoral imprints in the online space. Well Mark Pack has excelled himself in coming up with a draft set of principles for digital [...]
With regard to Julian Todd’s comment earlier, I would have to disagree that the electoral effect of anything on the internet has been entirely negligeable and unobservable. If you include things like email then it clearly makes up a large chunk of what people consume in terms of information about parties. Looking at the last US elections there was a massive amount of mail and online content generates, indeed large groups formed around social sites. The impact, whether direct or otherwise was probably as large, or at least potentially as any election broadcast could be.
A reply to Marks Pack’s “first stab at overall what such rules would cover”: http://www.techideas.co.uk/?p=302
[...] finally, Dr Mark Pack (Himmler) and Tom Watson (Goebbels) are thinking about the problems of spoofs pretending to be politicians, and what [...]
Suppose the candidate authenticates by link? If you go to their site and find a link back to the information source you were looking at, then you can have confidence that they authenticated it.
Once you have something like that, people will use their basic knowledge that the internet is full of unreliable information, and check the person’s own website before they believe it represents them.
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