Fake news, hard facts and muddled opinions

Malta is not immune to fake news and disinformation campaigns, as exposed in the case of former health minister Chris Fearne.

“Around €6,500,000 was spent to fabricate a story with a single malign purpose: to politically eliminate me... First, they tried to find dirt … When they failed because there wasn’t any, they just fabricated it,” he wrote on Facebook, as he asked the police to investigate and the House of Representatives for protection.

Records obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and shared with the Times of Malta and the Boston Globe exposed a new vulnerability for the institutions of our microstate just as fake news has snowballed worldwide. We seem ill-prepared for these new vulnerabilities that even caught major global powers off guard.

I belong to Fearne’s generation. We saw Malta transform from an insular and isolated island to a population of digital migrants and frequent fliers. Technologies and neoliberal ideology encouraged us to learn, dream, work, and form relationships across borders. Society is more complex due to the fragmentation and decentralisation of crucial aspects of our existence. “Wherever I lay my hat, that's my home,” became a reality as we spread our wings and adapted to an emerging new human condition.

While fake news is not a modern invention, the current tsunami of fake information is unprecedented. It is almost impossible for citizens to decide what to believe. Political scientist Richard Perloff aptly described how disinformation is “contaminating the climate of factual discourse.” Fake content extends beyond news to include rumours, conspiracy theories, and manipulated data. Such information has “a patina of news that does not constitute journalism but can algorithmically and psychologically animate like-minded users,” wrote Perloff. Misleading or biased information manipulates narratives or facts and aims to deliberately confuse or deceive audiences.

Since media freedom is a cornerstone of democracy, the implications are significant. Information empowers citizens to deliberate and partake in meaningful political engagement. Thus, the engineers of fake news do not merely destroy the reputations of political enemies, whether individuals or inconvenient nations, but they also disrupt the entire democratic system. In these processes, businesses can be as insidious as states and political players.

There is a veritable shadow war, and as individuals, no matter how discerning, we have limited capacity to understand what is happening in this seemingly parallel universe. Our analysis is constrained to what surfaces in the public realm, often years later, when the damage is impossible to contain and hard to reverse. Meanwhile, the information flow is poisoned by suspicion and speculation, creating a hyperreality where facts are perceived as illusions while conspiracy theories and fake information are sometimes accepted as gospel truth.

In Fearne's case, fingers are pointed toward two firms, CT Group and Audere International. Both denied unethical actions but were previously associated with negative campaigning that included character assassination. CT Group is renowned for facilitating successful political victories for former Australian prime minister John Howard and former British Conservative prime ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. The company's methods had raised some ethical concerns despite claims of legality and distancing from fake information.

These days disinformation is deeper, more insidious, and systematically spread at an international level. In Europe, the hard-right now leads in this hall of mirrors, thriving on its ability to stir public emotions on issues that other parties, now highly fragmented, seem unable or unwilling to address. Anger and anxiety coalesce in a decentralised environment overcrowded with fora for direct communication and action. Voters of all political persuasions are enticed, usually by the hard right, to scratch a national itch, turning it into an inflamed wound that risks festering.

In this era, public figures are frequently collectively disparaged as corrupt, betraying public trust for personal gain. The traditional political elite, including the Brussels-based echelons of power, rarely inspire and may appear disconnected from people's varied and possibly contradictory concerns. When parties seem preoccupied with protecting their turf and detached from their mission and vision, they often render themselves irrelevant.

In this context, the king of disinformation for right-wing parties is actually Steve Bannon, who became famous because of his role in Donald Trump's 2016 US presidential campaign. Later, he fell out with Trump and embarked on a tour of Europe advising the hard right on how to harness the power of negative campaigning and disinformation. In this main narrative, legacy media are systematically branded as “fraudulent” and “fake news media” by those inspired by Trumpist rhetoric.

Although the hard right did not make any gains in Malta, the impact of disinformation is equally tangible. The fake news targeting Fearne highlights how disinformation can be weaponised to discredit and destabilise elected officials and such powerful effort can be engineered overseas. Such tactics not only threaten individual reputations but also undermine the integrity of democratic processes by manipulating public opinion. They may also undermine national interest and a country’s sovereignty.

Addressing the proliferation of disinformation requires multifaceted approaches, including enhancing media literacy to empower citizens to critically evaluate information, encouraging transparency in digital platforms to curb false information, and holding accountable those who knowingly propagate disinformation and fake news for political economic gains. Safeguarding democracy also necessitates international cooperation to address cross-border disinformation and to mitigate its impact.