1.
Truth, Trust and Technology:
strategic communication in the
misinformation age
Prof Charlie Beckett
LSE
NATO College, Rome
2018

2.
Goals of strategic communication for NATO
•Understanding
•Influence
•Change
•‘Environmental’
• external, internal, data, policy, role
• public, authorities, experts, media
• perception, elections, funding,
military, security, diplomatic
• Evidence, accountability, record,
objectivity

3.
NATO strat comms problems
•Lack of political and public support
•Specific propaganda effects
•General undermining of support for values and
purpose
•Information abundance and diversity
•‘Post-truth’ relativism that hinders information
deliberation

4.
What did you need to know today?

5.
Is my flight home delayed?

6.
What’s the latest on #Brexit?

7.
What is the latest Hammers ‘news’?

8.
Mixed news media – but all networked
• Traditional ‘legacy’media
• Social news media
• Social networks/platforms

9.
News becomes personal
• Social sharing
• Email newsletters
• Topic selection ‘My FT’
• Facebook algorithms
• Personalised search
• News aggregators
• Facebook/Twitter feeds
• Artificial intelligence
• News bots
• Gamification

10.
Global networked news war

11.
Rampant relativism

12.
Not just Facebook and not just elections

13.
Bot wars: polarising, fomenting

14.
It’s not just social media

15.
Post-Truth?
1. Over abundance of information creates
confusion
2. Fact-checking is limited
3. Algorithms struggle to filter, platforms
incentivise for attention not accuracy

16.
Trust
1. Deference is gone, welcome scepticism?
2. Transparency is vital, but just the start
3. Filter bubble or community?
4. Real problem is curation, connection,
personalisation

17.
Trust signalling

18.
Fake news is good news for reality-based
news media

19.
Opportunities for information innovation

20.
Zuckerberg cover photos

21.
What do you do about a problem like
Facebook?
1. Regulate?
2. Break them up?
3. Algorithmic accountability: what principles for
the platforms?
4. Platform/publisher relations: putting public
first

22.
Getting worse before it gets better?
1. Governments, corporations, lobby groups now
investing in information manipulation
2. New channels, platforms and networks will
provide fresh distribution outlets for
misinformation
3. Failure to address systematic problem means
we treat symptoms not structural challenges:
remember the banking crisis?

23.
It is networked

24.
What should public organisations and
journalists do?
• Transparency is the online currency of trust
• Interactivity is key to engagement
• Be on all the platforms, all the time
• Be strategic about who you want to influence (niche,
mass, switchers, nodes)
• Be strategic about why you want to influence
(behaviour change, opinion forming, media space)

25.
What should societies do?
• Regulate?
• Build public service media capacity
• Increase media literacy
• Open data
• More research

26.
Truth, Trust and Technology:
a new agenda for the crisis in public
information
@Charlie Beckett
c.h.beckett@lse.ac.uk