The preferred term for fake news now seems to be disinformation. Good enough, but is there progress in combating it? Necessary as they are, inquiries into how democratic processes in recent years were affected by fakery need to be accompanied by efforts to prevent repeats in coming electoral cycles. Stakes are high in both the US midterms and in whatever voting process – election or second referendum – helps settle the Brexit issue.
The newly released EU code of practice on disinformation shows how far debate has moved since Donald Trump in 2016 revived the old term “fake news”. At that time, to Trump’s and some other politicians’ advantage, it was particularly hard to say what was and was not encompassed by the term “fake news”. We have travelled some way since the tech giants were denying that anything was amiss, and since the words “Cambridge” and “Analytica”, used together, would have brought to mind only reference books or the like.Signatories to the code, which include Facebook, Twitter and Google, agree, among other things, that “open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes”.
Related: Defining fake news will help us expose it | Paul Chadwick
Related: What is fake news? How to spot it and what you can do to stop it
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