Fighting disinformation fast when it matters most

The US President is quarantining in the White House with a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease. There is a slew of false stories and conspiracy theories spreading across digital platforms and the US election is less than four weeks away.

There is always a lot at stake in the run up to any election. But now disinformation adds an extra element of the highest jeopardy: if voters don’t know what news to believe, how can they make an informed choice that will shape the future of their country? Might those false stories tip their thinking, deter or even prevent them from voting at all?

And thousands of miles away in South East Asia, another very different election - in Myanmar. But the same threat. We have seen there already how disinformation has stirred ethnic tension - fostering division, fomenting violence and promoting hate. As voters head to the polls for the second time since the end of military rule in 2011, the stakes are very high, the threat of disinformation great. And over the past 6 months, Covid-19 has exposed another dark side of misinformation and disinformation: it costs lives.

This time of global uncertainty and fear has provided fertile ground for falsity - unproven preventions and fake cures which sometimes prove fatal. One report puts the global human cost of bad information about Covid-19 at over 800 deaths in just the first three months of 2020, according to the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. If we can do anything to fight the most serious disinformation - to make elections fair, and save lives - we should. The BBC has stepped up investment and focus in its journalism around disinformation. Teams producing Reality Check, Beyond Fake News and others are working with the insight brought by BBC Monitoring to expose and debunk dangerous, and often malicious, falsehoods. But we believed there was more we could do in partnership with others.

A year ago the BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms - from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others - from the European Broadcasting Union, the Wall Street Journal and The Hindu to Reuters, AFP, The Financial Times, CBC/Radio-Canada, First Draft, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?

We all believed trying something was better that doing nothing - there are audiences and users running into billions across this partnership who are potentially touched by disinformation. And this is important for the BBC: with the commitment to impartiality at the top of our priorities we wanted to work with others around the world to try and prevent some of the damage done by false news.

We have been experimenting over the past year with doing just that. Turning good intentions to action that works. But we have now found a way to alert each other so partners are on guard at particular times of the highest jeopardy, ready for the most serious “break-glass” moments when viral disinformation risks real world harm. And we have done that without in any way muzzling our own journalism. We have been sharing alerts over Covid-19, and before that, over falsities which posed a threat to democratic integrity during the UK and Taiwan Elections. And now we are sharing alerts over the most serious disinformation in two very different elections - in the US and in Myanmar. And because different news organisations are most relevant in different regions, we are working with a wide and expanding group of publishers. In the US we are also working with the Washington Post, AP and the LA Times.

Speed is at the heart of the response because the most serious disinformation has the potential to go viral very quickly – and turn from words and images online to real harm in the real world. When a false story, from a fake “BBC Breaking” Twitter account, claimed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dead in April, a fast alert amongst the partners stopped the lie spreading across the internet and around the world, where it could have caused panic and moved markets. When people in the UK, and later Canada and the Netherlands were urged in Facebook and Instagram posts to burn 5G masts, feeding on the conspiracy that linked Covid-19 to 5G, again a fast alert played a part in preventing destruction that could have compromised the response of the emergency services and cost lives.

The Trusted News Initiative has evolved over the past year to become the only place in the world where disinformation is discussed in real time, as it happens, by some of the most trusted global news organisations and the biggest tech platforms. It is a significant step in the fight against disinformation, alongside other welcome developments in the past year such as the increasingly important role of fact checkers across the world. But the threat is changing too – all of us have to work out how best we can meet that threat.

Footnote - Partners involved in the Myanmar fast alert: AFP, AP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, EBU, Financial Times, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Microsoft; additional partners for Covid-19: The Daily Maverick and the Mail and Guardian, South Africa.