Tech platforms are playing an ever-increasing role in people’s lives - particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to more people spending more of their day online. As their power and reach expand, the challenge of addressing how disinformation spreads on the platforms becomes more urgent and more complex.

Increasingly, governments are realizing that they cannot tackle a complex problem like disinformation with siloed strategies. They need holistic approaches to platform governance - a broad term that captures the many ways in which a social network governs the activity of its participants. This includes rules, policies and norms that affect how content is moderated - and how widely disinformation spreads.

During a virtual exchange held on July 21 by Apolitical - in partnership with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Reset Initiative - civil servants and experts agreed that governments need to consider the systems in which disinformation spread and approach platform governance with coordinated and collaborative approaches.

Countries like Canada are helping to lead the way and providing potential models for others. But the participants highlighted that more work is needed to understand how to implement holistic approaches effectively, measure success and share knowledge across countries.

Canada’s approach as an emerging model

Ahead of the federal election in 2019, Canada wanted to be ready to deal with potential online harms and election interference risks. It developed a Protecting Democracy strategy, which took a horizontal whole-of-government approach to platform governance.

The effort used a range of strategies - including educating the public through a Digital Citizen initiative, developing a protocol for notifying Canadians of a threat to the election, and supporting the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism to share information and coordinate responses to threats.

Since the election - which passed without a major incident - the Canadian government has sought to transfer this effort to address online harms into a permanent workstream. Building on the election experience, the Privy Council set up a multi-disciplinary cross-cutting team to look at issues like media literacy, platform governance, data and privacy in a holistic way.

There’s no single lead department for the strategy. Instead, the Prime Minister assigned specific tasks on online harms to specific Ministers while emphasizing the interconnected nature of the issues and the need to work collaboratively to address them.

Participants at the exchange felt that Canada’s model shows the potential for holistic approaches, but also highlighted limitations. Perhaps most notably, it’s difficult to measure its success. Whether the election passed without incident because Canada was prepared - or because no bad actor made a serious attempt to disrupt the election - is not yet known.

Figuring out how to evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches is a key area for future research and collaboration. It also depends on cooperation from the platforms - who control the data and whose efforts cannot yet be independently audited. Canada is still working to configure this.

Five principles for effective holistic approaches

Like many cross-government collaboration efforts, holistic approaches to platform governance can be fraught. Participants believed that the experience from Canada and other countries offers some principles for how to make them work:

  1. Have clear goals. Without clear goals, holistic approaches risk being so all-encompassing that they never lead to concrete action. Governments need to carefully consider which issues and departments to include and which to leave out.

  2. Define responsibilities. Without a single lead responsible for the work, the worst case is lots of blame-shifting. Holistic approaches only work when roles and responsibilities between departments are well-defined.

  3. Partner with media, civil society, and the private sector. Government has a vital role to play, but not as a sole partner.

  4. Have a coordinated strategy for engaging platforms. The more similar the demands platforms receive from countries, the more likely they are to respond to them. Participants emphasized that small countries, in particular, will be more successful with their holistic approaches to platform governance if they band together.

  5. Be prepared to navigate the politics. In some countries, disinformation - and the solutions to address it - are highly politicized. At times, politicians may also chase headlines - for example, prioritizing the resolution of a sensational one-off case - in ways that disrupt cross-government efforts. Civil servants need to anticipate and be prepared to deal with the politics of disinformation if holistic approaches are to succeed.

But more coordinated knowledge sharing and action are needed to put these principles into practice. With the rapidly shifting and transnational nature of the problem, holistic approaches within a country are only likely to work with more holistic international cooperation. – Joanna Mikulski

(Picture credit: Unsplash)