*This is the editor of WIRED UK weighing in.
The Parliament's helpless. Good thing they're on vacation then, I reckon
Two PDF files will come to define the state of the West’s political landscape, circa 2018: the US Department of Justice’s indictment of twelve Russian intelligence agents for hacking the 2016 presidential election; and the British House of Commons’ interim report on disinformation and fake news, published this week. Whether their effect will be comparable at all is hard to tell.
They are two very different documents, for tone, scope, and language. What connects them is their subject matter: how technology has been weaponised — by foreign powers, culture warriors, reckless mercenaries, and careless technologists — to disrupt elections in multiple countries. The DOJ’s document is a fast-paced spy story, where spooks shoot about cryptocurrency to rent servers, steal the Clinton campaign's emails, and turn them over to Wikileaks – a digital transparency champion hijacked to do the bidding of shadowy agents.
The British report reads, fittingly, more like a Lewis Carroll’s tale: the 12-people parliamentary committee on Digital, Culture, Media & Sport have stepped into a rabbit hole, and now they cannot help meeting with an ensemble cast of friends, foes and helpers, burrowing deeper and deeper with each encounter. In perfect Carrollian fashion, it all started with a question of semantics: “what does ‘fake news’ mean?”
When the DCMS committee launched its inquiry in early 2017, that was a question worth asking. The election that had ensconced Donald Trump in the White House had seen the online discourse dominated by Pizzagate — a conspiracy theory maintaining that Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring from a pizzeria in Washington, DC — and by a galaxy of sham news sites spouting pro-Trump balderdash....
