Pavel Danilin: It Is Important to Understand Who Shapes the Spread of Information in the Digital Environment
Fact-checking on social networks can itself turn into a tool of political influence, so people need to be able to understand sources of information, not just find fakes.
Representatives of dozens of countries will gather in Moscow from October 8 to 10 for the II Global Digital Forum to discuss how to build technological partnerships and integrate digital solutions into national ecosystems. Pavel Viktorovich Danilin, Director of the Center for Political Analysis and political scientist, emphasized in a conversation with the online publication IT Russia the importance of the topics discussed at the forum, noting in particular that a person capable of independently verifying a message and understanding the mechanism of its spread is far less dependent on others' interpretation of events. He also spoke about how social networks have changed the spread of information, why fact-checking can become a mechanism of political influence, and what constitutes a country's informational self-sufficiency.
– Today, any social media user becomes simultaneously a consumer and a source of information. This has sharply accelerated the spread of messages, including false or partially false ones. So the problem no longer boils down to simply finding a fake. It is important to understand where information comes from, who shapes its spread, and what influence it gains in the digital environment.
I specifically studied the practice of fact-checking on social networks. And there is a serious problem here: a tool that is supposed to help separate reliable information from unreliable can itself become a mechanism of political influence. We saw such examples during election processes in Moldova, when the operation of social networks and content verification mechanisms influenced the spread of certain messages.
Therefore, media literacy is not just the ability to recognize an obvious fake. A person must understand who the source of a message is, why this particular information ended up in front of them, and how it was verified. It is necessary to compare different sources and see the difference between establishing facts and attempting to impose a particular interpretation of them.
For a country, this is a matter of informational self-sufficiency. In the digital environment, it is important not only to develop one's own technologies and infrastructure but also to build information-handling skills in society. If a person is capable of independently verifying a message and understanding the mechanism of its spread, they become far less dependent on others' interpretation of what is happening.
