Is a more digitized society a safer society?

Minsait collaborates with the PROVULDIG2-CM program "New Scenarios of Digital Vulnerability: Media Literacy for an Inclusive Society", co-financed by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund, with the intervention of José Antonio Rubio, director of Electoral Solutions, at the round table "Four approaches to digital culture".

The question that introduced the reflection, stated as "Digital culture and personal security", was precisely whether a more connected, more automated society... leads to a safer society for the individual and for the community.

The statistics on security incidents published by Radware, Kaspersky and other reputable magazines such as The Register coincide in the increase in denial of service (DDoS) attempts against infrastructures deployed on the Internet, as well as intrusions and other types of damage that threaten data security.

There is a widespread consensus in the management teams of large organizations on the priority attention to cybersecurity, which highlights the importance of the risks and threats that a more digitized society brings to businesses and institutions that provide electronic services to citizens.

Crime statistics published by the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Spain reveal an increase in hate crimes (racism, xenophobia) that are spread through the Internet and, in particular, through social networks, which highlights that there is an effect of digitalization that violates rights and freedoms of the individual sphere.

We know that the spread of fake news on social networks generates dynamics of exclusion between social groups that postulate and defend different positions, particularly for ideological and political motivations, leading to polarization and intolerance that triggers the abuse of language and other manifestations of violence.

The effect of information abuse and, in particular, the proliferation of hoaxes and fake news during election campaigns -which spread digitally at a faster speed than the rest- has become a dangerous digital habit for the health of our democracies, which not only threatens the personal sphere of candidates, political leaders and institutions in charge of the organization of electoral processes, but also drags many voters towards disaffection and distancing from politics, and leads to abstention and even to the "punishment vote" against parties based on falsehoods propagated by the media.

José Antonio's speech ended by sharing some initiatives that shed some light on the enormous problem of vulnerability associated with the increase in digitalization, such as the one led by the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court which, during the campaign and election day of October 2, invited citizens to use an Alert System to report information abuses in the face of violent attitudes, hate speech and disinformation about electoral content.         

The Inoculation Science research led by the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol reveals an interesting way towards "vaccination" against the virus of disinformation, consisting of training and evidence of information abuse, of its true pretensions with manipulative purpose, so that we can visualize, rethink and share to socialize more educated and critical attitudes against hoaxes and lies.