On this day, five years ago, the United Nations inaugurated September 28th to be Access to Information Day. For the past two years, they have modified this day to be termed the International Day for Universal Access to Information. This year's theme is the right to information in times of crisis, and on the advantages of having constitutional, statutory, and/or policy guarantees for public access to information to save lives, build trust and help the formulation of sustainable policies through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
In writing this article, I sought to consider those hurdles that stopped these worldwide goals from being fully actualized by utilizing correlation. The first hurdle that presented itself was the statistic posted by the United Nations which asserted that as of July 2020, 41% of the global population does not have access to the internet, stunting their ability to receive information.
The second hurdle presented itself through the data from UNESCO's Insitute for Statistics, which posited that of the 7.6 billion people in the world, 773 million of them are illiterate, and therefore encounter issues with processing and assimilating information. What is extremely noteworthy is that the countries which have higher illiteracy rates also have low rates of internet access. These countries are mostly Asian and Middle Eastern. This tells us that the culture for receiving and disseminating information is not constant and that one's geographical location very much influences their relationship to information.
The third hurdle arose when I shifted the lens from a global perspective to a regional perspective- I tried to consider those factors that stopped the Western World, and specifically the Caribbean from enjoying access to information. I've found that our issues lie not with our access to information, given that the Caribbean can boast of being one of the most wired regions in the world, but our access to accurate information.
Access to information comes easy for us but we too have our share of hindrances, well perhaps just one. This issue is what I would consider to be a growing cancer, and the most obvious danger to the world of information - fake news.
The scholars at Cambridge University submit that this term, 'fake news', which was made popular by President Trump, is a false story that appears to be news. This information is often circulated through the internet or any other type of media, really. In this millennium, fake news has evolved from the Soviet Union planting misleading stories to embellish the benefits of communism, to the Germans professing of a 'superior' Aryan race. In more recent times, fake news took on the forms of President Bush's administration justifying the war in Iraq by saying that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, conspiracies being spread to influence the 2016 Presidential Elections in the United States, and President Trump downplaying the dangers of coronavirus, resulting in persons not following social distancing measures.
Fake news is nothing new, lying to the public has become the norm. However, this is the first moment in history where false information has been so blatant, and where persons have shared false information without consequence. History shows us moments in politics, especially, where ministers who were exposed as liars to the public were forced to resign.
The spreading of fake news has many adverse effects. They can sow divisions within the society that could lead to violence, cause persons to disregard important information, as seen in the United States, where a plethora of persons refused to wear face masks under the guidance of President Trump who saw the coronavirus as a tedious matter. Scientists subsequently asserted that the rate of infection could have been reduced by about 70 percent if the masks were consistently used. This disregard for important information is seen again with the 'anti-vax' movement. Vaccines have proven to be a valuable public health tool and have eradicated many dangerous diseases. However, persons have found themselves refusing to be vaccinated, under the belief that the vaccine would somehow reduce the quality of their lives.
We in the Caribbean often proclaim, that whatever starts in the United States, at some point finds its way within our islands. While in the Caribbean, these instances of fake news have not been so glaring, we can look at how President Trump has thus far escaped consequence, and how false information has slowly crept its way into the governance of the world. People have now embraced the ideas of 'alternative facts' and the world being in a 'post-truth' era. What we have also seen is the proliferation of gossip blogs with solicitous information about persons.
And perhaps, as we celebrate our fifth International Day of Universal Access to Information, we could ponder on these increasing instances of fake news and ask ourselves how we could go about cutting out what has proven to be the gangrene of our digital world.
The effects are clear, the repercussions are not. The truth is, it all comes down to integrity - human beings have to want to tell each other the truth, but they don't. And so, this calls for us to look outside of our minds and morals for resolution.
There is no gainsaying that there needs to be the implementation of a system that increases the statutory responsibility of citizens to publish accurate information. Media Houses should spearhead a watchdog system, monitoring the content that finds itself before the eyes of our citizens from afar. Similarly, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter should be held just as accountable, as they too are conduits for false information. These measures, I believe, bind up the ropes of fake news before they can be mishandled.
