The right to the truth means having a full and complete knowledge of the events that took place, the people who took part in them and the circumstances in which they occurred, in particular manifest violations of Human Rights and serious breaches of humanitarian law.
The Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission) considers that the right to the truth is the response to the failure of the governmental authority to clarify, investigate, prosecute and punish cases of serious human rights violations. It states that this right is a fundamental pillar in the fight against impunity and an indispensable mechanism of justice for every democratic State, since it helps to prevent such violations from happening again.
In today’s Digital Ecosystem, the dynamics of content production and its exponential growth pose new challenges for preserving information about this kind of violation, as well as for the right to historical memory, which must also be protected. The concept of a digital black hole in the historical and cultural memory of countries appears when no record of this information is left for future generations.
The commitment of governments to protect digital memory is crucial, since the Internet is the pillar of social, economic and political conflicts, where platforms are a central tool for people to communicate, to get informed and to tell what is happening around them. They are also key to the digital documentation of serious human rights violations that occur in that context, and to creating and preserving the evidence that victims will need to recover their dignity.
In conflict scenarios information is very vulnerable. It is not enough to ask for a guarantee that platforms keep working despite power cuts, fallen towers and the overdemand on their services, which congests their infrastructure; freedom of expression must be protected, and the challenge of disinformation must be faced, along with increased content moderation, risks to privacy and the sanctions typical of war, without forgetting the right to memory, to remember, to investigate and to repair the damage.
During conflicts, social networks also become battlefields of information. Legitimate content fights for space with official propaganda, with manipulation -through artificial behavior, for example using bots- or directly with disinformation campaigns and fake news. A complex landscape in which it is hard to find the truth (or the truths), and in which the ability to preserve evidence of serious human rights violations is compromised.
With good intentions, the policies of each platform warn almost unanimously that they do not allow discriminatory ads based on race or on political or sexual orientation; they say they do not tolerate graphic content or content glorifying violence, nor the publication of personal information that identifies people (doxxing); nor do they accept the promotion of terrorism or violent extremism, and they work to prevent disinformation, for example. But putting this into practice in the middle of a conflict, where things are not black and white, is quite a challenge. Topical and violent content comes to occupy the space of everyday content, which is much more superficial and naive.
This problem is aggravated by the bias of the algorithms and Artificial Intelligence models, which quickly give priority to certain content according to its viral patterns, and these are usually far removed from what is really happening and what we call Truth. The current infoxication, which already keeps users in a state of continuous alarm and anxiety, is added to the noise of an avalanche of disinformation that today tends to give a very distorted view of Reality and means that platforms cannot guarantee the basic fundamental right to the preservation of a Digital Memory that is faithful to what is really happening.
Information overload or infoxication occurs when the amount or intensity of information exceeds the individual’s limited processing capacity, which can cause dysfunctional effects such as stress, inefficient work, ignoring information and being very selective in choosing what to read or watch (missing important items), among others. The term was coined by the information specialist Alfons Cornella to refer to information oversaturation, as an acronym of information intoxication (in Spanish, infoxicación). Its worst consequence is that it paralyzes us and keeps us from moving toward the goals we have set ourselves, whether individual or collective as an organization, through sheer information saturation.
The user’s disposition is to be always connected, ready to receive all the information the system sends, even though there is no time to go deeper into it. One of its consequences is jumping from one topic to another without stopping, without pausing to think, to reflect or to go deeper, where what matters is quantity to the detriment of importance or relevance. Those most predisposed to infoxication will be those who confuse the quantity of information with its quality.
This mass of noise makes it possible to introduce false information to the user, who is unable to discriminate between what is true, possible or flatly false. Therefore, in order to guarantee the preservation of Digital Memory and a scenario in which the Truth of what happened prevails, even in real time, governments and above all the large technology platforms must improve their current policies on how they handle content moderation and the parameterization of their large Artificial Intelligence models, which are the main cause of algorithmic bias and media noise.
If urgent measures are not taken, we will inevitably rush toward the disintegration of experience, replaced in value by the immediate, the current, the new, which, moreover, is transformed into the only social values. The subject turns toward novelty, what came before becomes obsolete, out of fashion, absolutely dispensable. The possibility is closed off that, in the subjective recourse to experience, the absolute difference be recreated between the original, lost time of subjectivity and the incessant movement toward its impossible capture. The subject no longer recreates, no longer compares, no longer makes use of what he or she possesses to judge, analyze and compare.
And it is in this immediacy of the digital that we must reflect on how to make all this technology, which allows us to follow what happens in real time and is shared over the internet, more a source of information about what happened and a help in forming opinions that allow us to emerge from crises, and not a source of disinformation. It is not a new dilemma; what would be new is to incorporate into the reflection the question of how this affects the Right to the Truth.
In the midst of the technological revolution of the new Web 3.0 we must take a critical view in order to propose new mechanisms that guarantee Freedom of Expression, the Right to the Truth and the safeguarding of Digital Memory, in the face of a social and technological phenomenon that is changing the rules of the game: the convergence of media and its impact on the construction of public opinion. Starting from a reflective analysis of the correspondence between freedom of expression and democracy, and through a critical review of the impact of this new Digital Revolution on that relationship, complex challenges appear that confront freedom of expression, coexistence in democracy and the guarantees that fundamental digital rights will be upheld.
Originally published in Spanish on IANética (2022). English version prepared for TecnoHumanismo.
Related articles
HAL’s Ethics
Ethics. Algorithms are key elements of the services and infrastructures of information societies. Why we must understand how they decide.
Read article →9 min
The Right to Control Your Data: Our Data Belongs to Us
The Right to Data Control. A Fundamental Right over the Control of Personal Data will be one of the basic pillars of the Second Renaissance.
Read article →6 min
The Right to the Integrity of Being in the Age of Neurotechnology and Cyborgization
Neurotechnology and cyborgization promise advances in medicine and communication, but raise ethical challenges for autonomy, privacy and human integrity.
Read article →6 min