Disordered truth in a democracy

How can we navigate a world where truth is increasingly contested?

Every day, we are bombarded with information – from social media and TV screens to newspapers and advertising. Information can now be supercharged by powerful generative AI tools, making it harder to know what’s true. In an increasingly divided society, everyone seems convinced that their version of the truth is correct.

This panel will explore how these forces are shaping democracy in Scotland. We’ll examine how false or biased information spreads, who benefits from it, and what’s at stake if we don’t respond. The discussion will also highlight practical ways to spot bias, avoid manipulation, and help build a stronger, fairer democratic system.

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated so may feature errors.

0:00
How is that? Can everyone hear me here? Good evening. Everyone here in the Ullapool village hall and online. We’ve got many people joining us online, so thank you for joining us, and thank you to the Ullapool Village Hall Association for hosting us here. So appreciate this. I’m Des Thomson. I’m a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I’m currently a Leverhulme emeritus fellow with the University of the Highlands and Islands. I’m feeling very much at home at the moment because I hail from Sutherland, from the small village of Colerain, which is directly east from here on the other side. Before we begin, we’re not expecting any fire alarms or any drill. So if the fire alarm does go off, we head out the back, just into the car park outside. We’ve got people joining us online. And once we get into the presentations and then the questions and answers, we’ll have someone in the room, sort of catching all the questions that we’re going to get online. So just to mention, the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It’s Scotland’s national Academy. The society uses the combined knowledge and expertise of its 1800 fellows, really, to provide independent expert advice to policy makers and hopefully to inspire the next generation of innovative thinkers. And I’m delighted to see we have some here, and we’re here this evening as part of a series of events the RSE is holding to try and help people engage with the issues and matters most. That matters most to voters shaping Scotland’s Future. Ahead of the May elections for the Scottish Parliament, and running through the autumn, we’re putting on a number of events. We had a terrific event in South Scotland. We’re here, of course, we’re in uncle high school tomorrow, and we’ve got further sessions planned for Dundee and Aberdeen. And I have to say we are immensely pleased with the reception we’ve received for these events. Now this evening, before I hand over to the panel, I just wanted to say we’re asking a fundamentally important question, how do we navigate a world where truth is increasingly contested, and this topic is timely, indeed, only yesterday, it was in the main news in terms of the scope misinformation, given we are bombarded with supercharged information, How do we tease out the truth? How do we live in a democracy in Scotland and one of the most threatening and dark forces against this is misinformation? So that’s what we’re going to discuss this evening. And without further ado, I’m delighted to welcome our panel chair professor, Chris Carman Stevenson, Professor of citizenship at the University of Glasgow.

3:04
Chris, thank you des, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone on the line for joining us. So what I’m going to do this, or for the next few minutes, is explain what we’re going to do this evening and talk you through that, and then I’m going to provide a bit of basic context, right? So we can jump to the slides. We’ll skip that one, and here we go. So I’ll provide a bit of context and background, and then I’m going to turn it over to the three speakers, in order of Ellie Sean and Lucy to enlighten us on their on their topics. And then des will come back and offer some reflections on what has everybody said. And then we’ll make sure that we have plenty of time for questions and answers, both from those in the room, and then also, we’ll take questions from people online as well. So we want to start with the basic fact that we are in the world of AI generated content, and we are all going to be exposed to it one way or the other, no matter what. That’s just the way it is now. So we can a few examples, just to give you some sense of this, if you haven’t noted so this was recently reported in one of the sort of well established political news websites, Politico, that the age of AI deep fakes has hit European elections. Both the Dutch and Irish elections have very clear examples of deep fakes coming into the political discourse. What’s a deep fake? So I have an example. So just for context. Yes, in the Irish election, this what you’re about to see made it into the public discourse, and what you’re going to see is the leading candidate, Catherine Connolly, a deep fake video that was generated about her. Fraser, please.

5:23
In the last few minutes after Catherine Connolly campaign event, Catherine Connolly has confirmed her withdrawal from the presidential race.

5:31
It is with great regret that I announced the withdrawal of my candidacy and the ending of my campaign. Oh, Catherine.

5:39
Now that Catherine Connolly has withdrawn from the race. What does this now mean for the upcoming election on Friday? Well, simply put, Friday’s election.

5:49
That’s good. Thank you. Sorry. Is it just too? Is it too faded out the screen to the light? Yeah, the lights. Is there? Do we know? Is there anything that can be done to Can we dim the lights in some way, shape or form? I think that could cause problems for the live stream, but we can try it and see.

6:15
Sorry, we’ll pause for a moment while we try to sort the lights. Okay. Thank you very much. So that was an example of a deep fake, if you noticed, and probably you didn’t, because you couldn’t see the screen at the time, but sort of Catherine Connolly’s words in her mouth didn’t quite match up. It looked like almost one of those sort of old Japanese kind of, you know, Godzilla movies. But that’s an example of a deep fake that we’ve seen. And Fraser next, this has already creeped into Scottish politics. It’s not just Ireland and the Netherlands. In Scotland, earlier this year, Amazon was asked to take down several biographies of leading SMP politicians, one about Nicola Sturgeon, one about humza Yousaf. There was also one about John Swinney. The one about John Swinney said that he was born in the American state of Ohio to a Polish family. So obviously not quite accurate. And this was just generated by AI mechanisms and put on Amazon, and was being sold, you could buy these biographies, so Amazon was asked to take these down. And then, more recently, also of this year, though, in August, there was in the Scotsman newspaper an article from the full fact website notifying the public that they thought democracy was under threat, particularly from disinformation and misinformation in the upcoming election. So what I’m going to do is just make sure that we’re all clear on what these really terms really are, because these terms misinformation, disinformation, get thrown around a lot. So given that it’s going to come up in the conversation, want to make sure that we’re all clear on what these terms are. So misinformation is false or misleading information that is generally shared by mistake. So misinformation mistake. That’s the easy way to sort of remember that. So somebody might post on online saying, Oh, the Holyrood cost 200 million to build. Well, that’s wrong, and somebody might have said that online, that gets shared. And then all of a sudden people start believing it, and they start thinking, well, is that real? How much was it that’s misinformation. Disinformation is information rates disinformation and spreads it online, purposely to so people not knowing what’s true and what is there’s deep fakes. Deep fakes are these videos much like what I just showed you, of the one of Catherine Connolly that are generated again to mislead people. And then there’s finally AI slop. Ai slop is basically like what I explained earlier, the biographies that are generated. It’s just a lot of cheap, easy to generate, quote, unquote, information that’s put out on the internet. It’s shared around. And the fundamental problem with all of these things, misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, AI slob, is that it becomes very difficult for people to know what’s true and what isn’t true. We begin questioning very basic fundamental facts. Where was John Swinney born? Was he born? He couldn’t have been born in Ohio? No, maybe I don’t know. So we get these sort of things where we don’t know what’s true, and that’s the fundamental problem. And all of these things get out by botnets, which are these networked online accounts which share this information. They’re created simply to share this fake information, and they do it at pace. And so it starts flooding people’s. Feeds. And then finally, information and media literacy. Media literacy, information literacy, the skill of recognizing what’s credible and what’s not, which is increasingly important in this AI age, and what we’ll be talking about with school students tomorrow in school. And so where do you Where are people exposed to this sort of thing. Answer is just about everywhere. You might think, Well, I’m not really online much, so I wouldn’t really see this sort of thing. I’m not the sort of person who goes on Facebook or Tiktok or whatever, so I don’t just this past weekend in the United States, Fox News generated news stories based on AI generated deep fakes that had very distinctly racist undertones to them. They generated their news stories because they thought those deep fakes were real. So this stuff is actually even creeping into the news that is being reported by supposedly reputable news agencies. So it can creep in even if you’re not online. So just briefly, well, certainly somebody must be trying to protect us from all of this sort of thing. What is the regulatory framework? Regulatory framework? It’s not much. We’re not quite in the Wild West, but it’s kind of like we are a bit. So the Scottish Government has said that they are looking at reshaping their AI policies and how they’re going to try to deal with those, but they’re in the shaping phase. The UK government, of course, passed the online safety bill that gives the UK government the ability to try to get media companies and online companies that host these platforms to label AI generated content, but it’s trying to keep up with that is extremely difficult. And then I’ll stop sorry and just say that the rapid fact checking organizations, such as full fact are trying to make sure that people are aware of these things as well. So I’m going to stop there, and we can come back to this at the very end, and I’m going to pass over to Ellie next to take it on from there.

12:29
Thank you, Chris. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Ellie. I work for the John Smith Center at the University of Glasgow. I’m the researcher there, and we specifically look at young people and political engagement, and how we can motivate young people to get a bit more involved in politics. And my part today is I’m going to talk to you a little bit about some data that we found in our UK youth poll, which is an annual poll that we run in the UK with young people between 16 and 29 and the things I’m going to talk to you about today is very much about, how do young people get their news, how do they engage with the news, and what might that have to do with misinformation and disinformation? So yeah, it’s a poll that has qualitative and quantitative aspects, and we talk to young people around politics, democracy, political involvement, personal preferences, broad spectrum of what you can what might be important to young person. Next slide, please. So the very first slide, I want to show you the very first graph, and I’ll read out the important numbers if you can’t read it. We asked young people which of the following sources they use regularly to get informed about news or current events. And the very top two are social media platforms, 40, 58% and family, family and friends, with 44% number three, we’re then getting a bit more into traditional media. That’s a television news, then YouTube, online newspapers, etc. The ones that I’ve highlighted so you can see there’s four boxes around four options of these, which is social media, platforms, family and friends, YouTube and podcasts, and to me, those are the ones that are particularly prone to misinformation bias, where it’s not necessarily an editor or someone that’s actually fact checking facts, especially family and friends, feels quite biased potentially. So just to show the top two that young people pick, there are potentially quite pro formation. I trust social media sites more than traditional media and 47 49% agreed with that. That was the majority. So 49% of young people, or 16 to 17 year olds, trust social media more than traditional news media. 30, 41% disagreed. So slightly less. Thank you. Surprising Tiktok is number one. There was 64% Instagram, 60% Facebook surprised me a little bit, 52% I did not think a lot of young people are still on Facebook, but apparently they are. And then we have that followed by x, WhatsApp, Snapchat. Of other social media networks, but really the top two are Tiktok and Instagram. One question we asked young people, and we found this was all quite surprising. We asked them if they think social media platforms should be banned for under 16 year olds, and the majority said yes to that. So 67% want social media banned for under 16 year olds. And I’ve added some extra stats at the bottom there, basically showing that by age group, the older someone gets in in the young age group, the more they are likely to agree with this. So the 1617, year olds are not as convinced that they shouldn’t have social media than the 25 to 29 year olds, for example. Now, part of the qualitative data that we collected as well was, you know, we just talked to young people, so it’s not just questions, but we really wanted to understand what lies behind their answers and why do they answer the way they do. So we did ask around questions around social media and why they think it should be banned, and quite a lot of content came out of that. So, for example, inappropriate content, so that they’re exposed to manipulative or divisive political content and echo chambers that reinforce extreme views. Again, that kind of misinformation, disinformation is a very much big part of that, another aspect that found really interesting that they mentioned they’re constantly bombarded with news. So, you know, two decades ago, you had maybe you read your paper in the morning and then you watch the news in the evening, but now they just constantly bombarded on social media, and they actually feel like they’re missing out if they’re not constantly consuming this content. It’s very, quite interesting again, kind of thinking about what Chris said about AI sloppy. You’re just being bombarded with all this information, half of which might not be true. How do you read through that and really figure out what is correct and what isn’t? Young people also mentioned disinformation and misinformation as a source of trouble on social media, so to speak, especially in terms of political views and how they might be affected, how it might affect polarization and extremism among young amongst young people. And the fourth point I mentioned is a deterioration of social skills, which I think also relates to this topic, because if you stop learning how to engage with someone face to face that has maybe a different opinion than you, it’s also much easier to fall for disinformation, for misinformation if you if you just can’t have these discussions anymore. Two other aspects that were mentioned as negative impacts, but I think don’t quite relate to the topic tonight, were mental health impacts, and that just the time spent on social media is too much. Thank you. One aspect, so we’ve talked about misinformation, disinformation there as one of the negatives that young people mentioned. And I think one of something that at the center we quite campaign on is that one way to counter that is through civic education. Right? If someone knows how the political system work, they’re less likely to fall for information that shows something that’s not true around the political system. So we asked young people, again in the summer polling of the 16 and 17 year olds, if they think school has prepared them enough to know about politics and voting. And 64% said no. So they really didn’t feel like that. They knew enough around how politics would work, how voting works, to make informed decisions. And thus, I think they’re also, again, more prone to believing stuff that isn’t true on social media. This is just the last slide. Again. You don’t have to see the whole thing. It’s just we want the last question that we asked is, What are the most important issues facing the UK today? And it’s just a whole host of issues, of where the young people think these are the most important issues, and it’s just to say that the things we’re going to talk about tonight are actually not really high on young people’s agenda. So even though they see massive disadvantages on social media, for example, social media itself only ranks. I don’t know which rank is, but 11% so it’s not a very high number of young people saying this is actually an important issue to look at, or the impact of artificial intelligence, is the blue highlighted option at the bottom with 6% in comparison, those aspects that rank really high are really bread and butter issues like housing inflation, cost of living. Where do I get my next job from? Where does my next paycheck come from? So these are the issues that rank really highly for young people, understandably so just before we move on. And just to leave you maybe with some questions and something we can discuss later. Firstly, how can we ensure that young people on social media go up to confidently distinguish between misinformation and reliable information and cope with information overload, and secondly, just the idea that we have never been so fully informed as we are now. With all the digital tools at our disposal, we can all contribute. We can see news from all over the world. So is that actually a bad thing, or is that a good thing? Is top down, news and information creating. And sharing better than bottom up sharing just something to maybe think about. Thank you,

20:12
Sean. Thank you everyone. Okay, yeah, thank you for having me here. Thanks to the IRC for inviting me. I’m Sean McNamara. I am director of an organization called sips. So if we go to the next slide, a bit about us. So that stands for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland. So anyone that works in a library, like a school library, a public library, academic library, will be a member of us, and we provide them with training, with qualifications, with advocacy and support going through their career, and obviously librarians are a key role, as I’ll discuss in a moment, in this fight against misinformation, this battle for truth and trust, as well as that, we also Chair something called the media and information literacy Community of Practice. Now this is a group of organizations, originally mostly library based organizations, who care about media and information literacy skills, but as this has become a hotter topic that has grown and has organizations such as education Scotland, NHS, and lots of other people that have a vested interest in these topics, which shows it’s a growing challenge and something that lots of organizations need to work together on if we move ahead. So yeah, a lot of this is about trust, and we could go into this in a lot more detail, and hopefully we will in the discussion. But this is just some of the key things around this idea of trust and where some of this fertile ground for misinformation comes from. So Carnegie do a report every year called Life in the UK, and at the moment, in the recent report and the last few years, it showed that democratic well being is plateauing. So you know, trust in government, how people feel about the powers that be, and how much trust they have them, having them, is sitting at about 45% which, you know, is far lower than it should be. Recent reports as well and other publications show that trust in government in Scotland has fallen to 47% before the pandemic, that was 61% so you can see, just in a few years there, that’s a start drop. Now, reference to pandemic, that’s not the only cause of distrust growing. In fact, that in some some areas that may have increased trust, but you know, it shows in the last few years there has been a growth in this level of cynicism about about politics. Now this is for a variety of reasons. You know, one possible reason for it is definitely looking at news losing community spaces where they can engage with theseness and people feel that they don’t have power of their own lives. If something goes wrong, it’s their fault. They can’t see anything changing in government. Now that may not be the case, but it’s the feeling that a lot of people have that things aren’t changing, and that’s creating a feeling of powerlessness, so people are looking for solutions. Now you may like the rise of certain parties on the right, both in the UK and US, some of that is because they’re tapping into that powerlessness and often using misinformation to create an idea of answers these problems, these huge, complex problems like climate change, immigration, which don’t have easy answers, but some parties are providing easy solutions, often based on not entirely factual information, but people are. There’s a fair program for people to buy into that. So the threat of misinformation is clear as we’ve discussed. That misinformation is clear, as we’ve discussed, there’s an increase in parties using misinformation, either by accident or design, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Fake news travels in a study in 2018 showed that it travels six times faster than truth. So you can see why it can easily win the battle on on X or Twitter or Instagram that can just just fly if somebody posts something that’s fake news, if it taps into people’s emotions, if people want to believe it, they often will believe it. So Young Scots show that a lot of young people would like to be involved in politics, but they don’t know where to find trusted information. They don’t know the sources. I think we often fall into a trap of maybe saying Tiktok, bad, bad. Source, Google, reasonable. Source, an academic journal, great. Source. Is not always about that you can get factual information from different sources. It’s about having the skills to assess that. And there’s some other stats there at the bottom. I will not go through all of them, but it shows you though 85% of people worried about misinformation, 50% can’t distinguish. And so huge number of people know this is a problem. Know often that they are sharing fake news, but they’re not sure how to stop it, or how to really distinguish between their sources. So if we move on to the next slide, so from our point of view as librarians, it’s a library profession, we see this very much as a skills issue. Some of my colleagues in the academic circles have done a lot of studies into information poverty. This is a real issue, where if people are not able to access good information, then that has a lot of really tangible links to health and wellbeing, to actual poverty too. So what that does then is increase inequality. We’ve already got huge inequality in society, but if people in higher, higher reaches of society can access better information, then that will further exasperate that problem, so that increases cycle of poverty. And then on top of that, as we’ve discussed, we’ve got generative AI. So this is a huge problem, and one of the one, it’s also a solution. It can be a great tool. We’re all starting to use it. It can be very useful if you need to turn a spreadsheet into a really useful document really quickly. It’s not all bad, but the problem is is so much of the policy around it is being led by big tech. Big Tech have got the money to influence government. They’ve got the seat at the table when when policies come out about generative AI, they’re often really influenced by people with the most money and the most power, and they rarely will. They come to professions like the library profession or academics with experts in information and ask them to how to do generative AI ethically so it’s done in the right way, and understand all the issues around that. So anyway, there’s lots of models for people to find adults, to look at information, assess it, work out how to use it. And these are really, really tried and tested methods. Have been around for decades. Librarians have been teaching information literacy for years and years and years since, since the 70s. So all the skills are there, but it’s getting them to people. It’s people having the time to access them. It’s getting them into the curriculum, getting them into society. And we mentioned that there is the report in England about how in the curriculum misinformation is going to be in there, and that’s great. My one drawback is there’s not many mention of librarians within that, and they probably should be, because they are often the experts around that. But really positively in Scotland, education Scotland are currently going through a curriculum review cycle, and as part of that, have included information literacy, media, literary as part of that. So hopefully, as we move forward, these skills will embed themselves more into the curriculum, so our young people will be more skilled in dealing with it. Okay, if we move on to the next slide, please. Okay. So just to come to the end here, my cause is often about libraries. Of course it will be, but generally speaking, one of the things that I think is the problem here is we aren’t funding and supporting our public institutions enough. Community Centers have gone. Libraries have closed. These places where people could meet and discuss these issues or learn these skills are disappearing, or the staff in them are not there as much as they were in the past. Libraries across Scotland. There’s 500 libraries across Scotland. They are perfectly placed still to teach these skills, but they need to be seen as valued, in that they need to be supported, they need to be funded so that they can deliver that to adults and young people, so that they can get these absolutely vital skills as we move forward into the next election. In these more complex times, school librarians also school librarians not statue. In Scotland, you don’t have to have a school librarian. You don’t have to have a school library. That’s not the case in countries like Sweden. This is not a good move. You know, in England, they’re talking about funding public school libraries more politically, that has to be essential to get more school librarians in schools, because they can teach these skills. They can work with young people and support them to find the best information. Going forward, we are working a few things. I’ll just quickly mention. We’re working with Google on a super searches program that’s all about getting these skills to librarians. We’re also working we mentioned full fact in Scotland, the fact checking official organization is the ferret, who are a news organization that’s based in Glasgow, and we’re working with them and young Scot to try and empower librarians, so every librarian will get training in how to teach this stuff, so that when people come into the libraries, they can train them in these things. And hopefully that will roll out all across Scotland as we move forward. And then just finally, you know, this is a big issue as we move into the next election, but the Scottish Government are clearly aware of this media and information. Let’s say they have the open government program that’s been something that’s been going many years, and that’s all about increasing trust in government. So we know we need to do it, but how do we do it when there’s so many forces that are working against us with it? So my provocation is just to say, how can we provide people of all ages with these skills to navigate this information landscape? Because we can provide them with skills, but we need our public institutions, like libraries and other organizations that can do this to have a seat at the table to be able to influence policy around this. So how do we do that when big tech giants hold excessive and increasing money and power in this space? Thank you.

29:35
Okay, thank you. Hi everyone in the room. I know a lot of friendly faces. That’s good. And hello to people outside of the room. I’m coming today, not talking from my job point of view, but I do have a job as a researcher now. So my life is about research. I get very interested about information, but I’m just going to tell you a bit about when I stood for the general election last year for this area. I have to caveat, I’m not in the political party, and. More, and I’m not campaigning for politics. This isn’t a political broadcast or anything. But just want to share a bit of the stuff I had. So I said for the area. Case now, Sutherland, Easter, Ross. Now, one thing from the get go, the information there is a little bit inaccurate, because that constituency actually now includes a large chunk of Westeros, which we’re residents. And as you can see on that map, bowler pool is there. So part of my campaign, the early stages of research, was kind of looking at that and how to kind of get out there to folk and actually say our boundaries have changed. This is actually affecting you. We’re no longer in ROSS Lochaber sky as a constituency. And part of the competition, sort of part of the thing, was looking at the competition, and you get all these leaflets that come through your door, and I’ve put them through plenty people’s doors, and I’d sometimes see them go straight to the blue recycling bin. I was like, Oh, that’s good. They’ve been reading the information from the Highland Council. They know which bin to put the paper in. But in my early days, before I started working on the farm, I trained as a surveyor, and I still have a scale ruler in my pencil pot. And I got through these various leaflets that you get through and won from the competition, had a image of the predictions of what will happen at the polls. And I kind of thought, I’m pretty sure, compared to what had happened at the last election. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t look right from my scale ruler point of view. So I got my scale ruler there, and I saw it significantly inaccurate. And that initially annoyed me, but I thought, right, I’ll wait till the next lot of paper comes through the door. And again, it was the same. So I ended up writing to the electoral commissioner’s office after the election. I just said, As a heads up, here’s some scale ruler things looking at political information that comes through your door. Since then, that same party’s put some more through, and it’s actually been accurate. So I have to say someone paid attention somewhere. But you can never trust anything that even comes through your door, so you should always know where to fact check it anyway. Doorstep confessions. What I wanted to talk to you guys about was what I found from going from door to door. Because, of course, you can spout numerous things on Facebook. I don’t have a Tiktok. I believe that track to Tiktok is really popular in the farming world, but as a candidate, you have to get out there onto people’s doorsteps, and sometimes that’s going to events like celebrating people, finding out about good things in the community, or learning and meeting new people, but mainly walking. And so I got a lot of steps in 20,000 a day, so I’m a wee bit unfit now after the campaign, but that’s that’s where it took me. And I guess if we can go into the next slide, I was going to talk about doorstep confessions. So I met a lot of dogs, and I do like dogs, and I’m a dog lover, so that was all good. I never got any attacks from dogs, but I sometimes did get attacks on the doorstep, and that was good, positive and negative, and it’s a chance to engage with people face to face, and whether that’s from the very young I was down in alt Bay, and as I was going up to someone’s door, two little girls in the garden said, What are you doing? And I said, Oh, I’m coming to do some election campaigning and canvassing. They said, What does that mean? And so I spoke to them and said, You know what it was about? And I think that kind of engagement is amazing, that very childlike someone would come up to you, but other people would just slam the door in your face and don’t even want to talk to you. But getting out and about in the community is really important. I think that’s something here that you guys have sort of emphasized, that there’s not enough of these spaces. Ullapool is a very engaged community. I mean, we’ve had people like Jean Urquhart who brought amazing events like changing Scotland so on to this area. But generally, since the pandemic, it’s become a new social norm that we stay indoors and we conduct our communication online. And that hasn’t really changed. And even when I said to my young people this day, I said, Are you coming over tonight? They said, Oh, you must be joking. I’m not going out to that. So we have to find new ways of engaging, if we can have the next slide. Some of the things you know, when you’re out and about, you might see different opinions. You might see the North Coast 500 the land weeps Facebook page, which you know, does show horrendous things, like people going to the lavatory in people’s back gardens, and I’ve experienced myself finding someone with their trousers down around their legs. And of course, that happens, but there’s the other side of the story. And you know, when I was out and about in Westeros, I came across these signs myself looking for a loo. You know, if you’re going to our loo, as a small business, our electricity costs have tripled so far this year. We’d therefore be very grateful if you turn the lights off before you leave this toilet, and that shows you what the real concerns are to people in an area and getting out there and meetings, I think it’s very important, certainly for people who are considering being elected representative. You don’t get paid to be a candidate. It’s all voluntary. So if we can empower people within our communities to build on our community strength and build democratic systems, I think that’s a good thing. So moving on to my provocation, it’s actually I’d forgotten this banners up to the up here, but I got on my presentation because I was part of the group of women that sewed that. Banner in 2018 not very good at sewing, but if you can see the sheep in the boat that was me and my daughter was the small girl with a fiddle. She’s now a 15 year old girl with a fiddle. But a few of us got together at Antalya solace, and then we marched in Holyrood with this banner to celebrate that in 1918 some women got the right to vote, not all women. So as you can see in I don’t you can see that graph that is accurate, because that’s from the house of common library, or at least I hope it is accurate, but I didn’t take my scale ruler to it. But here you can see quite a low turnout, and it’s pretty much. It’s only marginally lower than it was last year in 2024 so it shows that people aren’t really engaging as much as they used to. And 1997 I think, was the last kind of peak, when things could only get better with Tony Blair and new labor and so on. And since then, there’s been a drop. And whether that’s because things have got a wee bit better, and things aren’t as hard for people. I mean, you can see, after the Second World War, there was a huge turnout, because things were pretty dire, and, you know, people needed to find a new way of being. We had things that came, like the National Health Service. So why aren’t people engaging? I guess what I found on the doorstep was some comments. I mean, even women, you know, there we got the sign votes for women. One woman met said, Oh, no, voting is not for me. I let my husband do that. And I said, Well, you do understand that women have actually fought and died for the right to vote, and in 1918 only women who were age 30 or over and had property rights, were allowed to vote, which is why there was a significant change after 1928 that then women were, in general, allowed to vote. They were considered on a more equal basis than men. But even now, there’s a lot of Van dwellers and Caravan dwellers I met on the road, people living in different situations, who aren’t necessarily registered to vote, and we had the new issue of voter ID, and sort of having to have a photo ID, and that was quite challenging for people. And without getting out there and meeting different folks of different backgrounds and different living spaces, you don’t really find that so as a provocation, I wanted to say that, you know, should voting be made compulsory, like it is in Australia, but also accessible to all citizens who are aged 16 or over, who reside in Scotland? Currently, if you’re in England, you can’t vote till you’re 18. Well, in the West, it’s a general election as well. You can’t vote if you’re a European citizen. That’s the difference between Scottish and I suppose to look at the accessibility, but yes, my provocation is, should voting be made compulsory? So thank you very much.

38:01
Right? Thank you very much. All three very interesting presentations, and I’m sure there’s a lot of questions to give you a moment to put your questions together in your head. DES is going to offer us a few reflections first, and then we’ll come to the questions from those in the room and those online.

38:21
Thanks, Chris, what a fantastic panel. In fact, another round of applause, I think, for them all, please. Really brilliant expert advice we’re going to get here. Three things are going through my mind as I listen to the presentations. First of all, just the plethora of misinformation, disinformation and other forms of fake news that we’re being bombarded with, and how on earth do we distinguish between that and what we believe to be the truth? Secondly, skills. How do we upskill not just the youths we’ve been hearing about in the polling here, but all of us here, no matter what generation we’re at, how can we get better at spotting fake news and possibly, I think public libraries and other public hubs have a very important role to play play here in terms of socialization and discussing the issues. And the third thing, really thinking about Lucy and your earlier role is, so what do we want off the politicians? What do we want when we’re going to the polls in May next year? What are we going to ask of our prospective parliamentary candidates? What do we want government to do during the next term beyond May, and that’s something that’s very much going through my mind at the moment. What’s the ask that we’ve got of our politicians? Anyway, I’m going to leave it at that. Hand over to Chris, and looking forward to hearing from you all, and please be challenging with your questions.

39:58
Thank you, des, yeah, and. I’m thinking about the Sean mentioned the Carnegie UK report that’s just come out, within the pastor report, but their Scotland report was released this past week, so it specifically looks at sort of life in Scotland. And they have different measures. They talk about social well being, health economy and they have a special category of democratic well being. The Democratic well being is a good 20 points lower than any of the other categories. The most challenging condition for well being right now, according to Carnegie UK and Scotland is the state of our democracy, which is quite eye opening, I think, with that lovely, happy thought, could we turn to questions? Fraser has a microphone, so if you let us know, we can bring you the microphone for questions, or Fraser, if there’s any online, if you want to, you have the microphone. Yep,

41:08
so I’ve got one online already, and that is the first one is, should AI generated campaign materials, particularly on social media, be disclosed as machine made

41:22
interesting question. Anybody want to

41:26
I would say 100%

41:27
yes, 100% yes. From Lucy, I think it’s, I mean,

41:31
recently, I made an image in the program called Canva, which was to show a pastoral scene on a farm. And I wanted to show certain elements, and I sort of request it, but I kept my search terms, and then I referenced it, saying, made in Canva using AI, using the following search terms. So you know how someone’s you know, just as you go and commission an artist to paint your painting, you have a commission brief. You also have a commission brief for AI. So why should that not be referenced?

41:58
There was a candidate. I forget the name, and actually probably maybe shouldn’t even mention who got in a bit of trouble for generating in Scotland, who got in trouble recently for generating a website, des, you’re nodding. Maybe you remember the person’s name. They generated all their images for their website using AI, and they put it up, and it’s sort of them showing and I think it was something ridiculous, like it showed big mountains behind them, and they were, do you remember Dez, yes, so it was somebody generated their whole campaign website, basically doing This. Another MSP created a chat bot that mimicked themselves. So they put their voice into this and they and they then trained the algorithm to mimic their voice and mimic their policy positions. And they said, right, instead of, you know, coming and talking to the to me, the MSP, feel free just to interact with my chat bot. And you can probably, I’m getting some laughs in the room. You can imagine that some of the comments that came to the chat bot was basically, why should we even bother to pay you the MSP when you have a chat bot, can’t we just have the chat why? What’s the point? So, you know, people are trying to experiment, I think, with creative ways of trying to interact with their constituents, and sometimes maybe getting it a bit wrong and overdoing it. But Sean, you wanted to come in

43:31
just, I mean, I think with generative AI, it’s here, it’s here. There’s nothing that’s going to stop that train. It’s going to continue to be part of our politics, continue to be part of our society. So as much as I spoke there about it being a skills issue, it’s also a regulation issue. So yes, when people use these things, there should be regulation that makes people state that they’re using AI or why they’re using AI, and that needs to be built into it. This is what we’re lacking in at the moment. There is work going on to ensure that there’s regulation. But again, is there enough people, and there may be, but I’d call on any government that’s looking at regulation around AI to make sure there’s enough people around that table that understand ethical use of AI and proper use of AI, and that would cover things like making sure you state that you’re using generative AI on any kind of campaign materials.

44:20
Yeah, just, I mean, I absolutely agree with what previous speakers have said. I just read a report by demos previously. They’re a UK wide organization that particularly look at the health of democracy, and they have one big branch of looking at information and health of information society. And one of their recommendations is that technology companies, for example, would be required to watermark anything that comes out of their generative AI machines. So even if an individual generates a picture, it would have a watermark on it. This is AI generated now, of course, you can if you know how. So you can easily remove a watermark, right? But it would be a first step. And I think not just in politics, but in anything that’s AI generated, there should be, especially by organizations, if it’s used in an official capacity, in some way, it should be, somehow.

45:12
There was a famous image of Donald Trump with a large group of black women. And this is, you know, the Trump campaign specifically targeted African Americans and Hispanics to try to win them over to vote for Trump. And one of this, one of the things was, you know, see how popular Trump is with African Americans. And the entire thing was aI generated. So they were, but they were using this, you know, and Trump was, of course, tweeting this out or putting it on his true social thing, as if it were real, without any sort of watermarks or these sorts of things. So Should these sorts of things be? Should you have to indicate that they are generated if you are sort of making it up for illustrative purposes, perhaps, as you’re trying to make a point during a campaign, right? So if anybody hit here,

46:09
thank you. And I suppose I feel that maybe you’re all being too optimistic. So it seems to me that you know certainly misinformation and disinformation can be more or less realistic. People can be better and worse at spotting IT people. We can try and train people to do it, but very soon, there’s not going to be the possibility of training to people to do it, because it’s just going to be too convincing and too realistic. So what do we do in the face of that? And what do we do when the next major election comes along where some major piece of disinformation was released that we, you know, the day before in an election, saying, I don’t know, someone slept with someone, or someone did some hideous deed or and then we think that that changed the election the next day. What? How do we address and tackle those kinds of more more pessimistic issues.

47:05
Just a small question there.

47:08
Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s speaking my wife, when we’re coming up here, these kind of issues, it often is very easy to think this is quite dystopian. Some of these things, it’s trying to think of ways to try and look at it in a positive light. But you’re right, things are going to get more convincing. I mean, some people say that AI will always have a certain amount of nonsense to it, that will always be spot, but that’s just a theory. That’s just a technological based theory. I mean, I would hope that the more people are aware of these tools, the more that they will be expecting them, and it will just make it less likely that people will believe anything, and that may be more of the threat than people believing something that could be very convincing, because all parties could use it in the same way. So so people will be, you know, reluctant to use these tools for for negative gain, if the others could just use it as well. So, yeah, yeah, I think it still just goes back to the more people will see it. And you look at Brexit, when the fake news on the bus and things like that, you know, people look back on that and see that such a negative that already the mood has changed and the public about how they trust information. So it’s more about getting that trust back, so that people will trust anything. Yeah, but yeah, no, you’re right. It will get to a point where it’s going to be so convincing that it’s, it’s hard, although, so far, you know, I think deep fakes have been around for several years, and there’s still very few that are convincing anyone. There’s very few that people using them actually for political gain at the highest level. So hopefully that’s because it just seems such a, such a dystopian way to do politics.

48:42
Um, I mean, I absolutely take your point, and I think as well, you know, like telling people like, Oh, look at the amount of fingers on a picture. Are the fingers Correct? Of course, that’s going to change, and it’s going to get much better. Just the one thought that I have in my head that kind of keeps me a little optimistic is, I think we’ve always had lies in politics. This is not anything new, and we’ve always had people who question facts and who who try to find out right, like who reveal these, these lies. So I’m not saying that’s good. And obviously the amount of lies we get bombarded with through social media is massively bigger than maybe in the past, but I just feel like we have managed to deal with things like that in the past. So hopefully going forward, people will stay critical and just to a natural, I’m making assumptions, but hopefully through a natural, like desire to question things and through learning it in school, that to question sources, I hope that we can still manage that, even if the sources Look 100% real. But it’s yeah, it’s obvious. I completely take your point. It’s very hard to stay optimistic.

49:48
Lucy, did you want to come in? Yeah. I mean, I think historically, just picking up what you said, and I might be wrong in this, but am I correct in saying that Saatchi and Saatchi kind of grew their advertising agency? Out of this little campaign, or vice versa

50:04
that sounds smooth

50:06
just thinking, you know, the sort of the smoke and mirrors aspect is really hard to get through, but it’s the ubiquitous nature of this information overload. And I think that, because it’s becoming ubiquitous to certain generation, they would go for their first port of call, you know, like, there I went for my first port of call, the House of Commons library. That’s not necessarily everyone’s knee jerk reaction. So it is about like embedding that kind of like civic learning, I think, at an early age. And we might be going through a dystopian time where people aren’t engaging. But modern studies shouldn’t just be a lesson that you have as an option for a national five or a higher or be so underfunded that you can’t find social science teachers in rural areas things like that. You know, we should embed it from a young age.

50:55
There are a variety of issues embedded in that question that you you raised and linked to Lucy’s point there about, well, you know, education, right? We might think that education is an appropriate thing for these, for dealing with, with verifying truth versus not truth. Political literacy, media literacy, information literacy. There is a problem, though, in that the the number of schools in Scotland declining dramatically. It’s fewer than half that that have modern studies as a subject that’s offered in that school. So it’s it’s troubled. The modern Studies Association is struggling right now. The the association of modern studies teachers. So how do we embed media literacy, information literacy, civic literacy, political literacy, in schools? And the school curriculum is that challenge. And I think Lucy was saying that the you know, they’re looking at the new version of the curriculum is being is coming forward, but I think so there’s that one issue with Yes, generative AI seems to be getting better and better and better. And that is, is true. You know, we’re getting fewer and fewer six fingered people and in that sort of thing, in these in these videos. But there’s also the other problem is, course, a lot of the linguistic AI, the information generating element of AI, are these large language models. So basically, they’ve built these systems that go out and they harvest all this information off the web, and they train them off of that information, right off of off of websites. And so these systems are training themselves. There’s an interesting thought experiment though, that as they’re generating more and more biographies that say that John Swinney was born in Ohio, those large language models are training themselves off of all the slop that they are generating. And so the issue there then becomes this sort of, it becomes harder and harder to know what’s true. But you also might think that there’s even more and more errors that may end up coming being sort of embedded in some of this. And then figuring out how you sort that out and how you parse that can be quite tricky with that, just to say that there are some potentially positive uses, and we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t discard those. And I think, like Sean was, was hinting at there, you know, for instance, I think it would be probably relatively reasonable to go to one of the sort of AI pick, your pick, many are available. So we’re not endorsing any pick your favorite. But you know, come the time that the parties start putting out their their manifestos, summarize the different environmental positions between the SNP, labor conservatives, Lib Dem reform, greens, you know, tell me that. Tell me the difference policies, right? That’s probably a relatively reasonable sort of thing to do. You point the AI exactly to the documents that you wanted to summarize, and it can do that. So there are potentially positive benefits for citizens of these, of these things as well. Sean, did you want to come back in? You look like you were? You had a thought tonight? I think I may be talked Fraser, and then we’ll see if there’s another question in the room,

54:26
another one from the online audience. This is what is the benchmark for saying something is true or reliable. There is the old cliche about one man’s truth is another man’s lie, or when you hear your truth.

54:41
There’s also the cliche that you’re You’re entitled to your opinions, but not not your facts, right? So where do we draw the line? We’ll start with the what would the library and say about that?

54:56
Yeah. I mean, there’s two things here. It says, you know, I. Intellectual freedom, and being able to have an opinion and being able to have that is something that we as librarians would also protect and fight for. And freedom from censorship is a huge part of our ethics and is very important. But there is, there are facts, and there are and where there’s facts available, then we need to upskill our people to be able to know when they see those facts and how to find them. Now, people can use facts in different ways, and there’s always going to be complexities and nuance. And even today, there’s been lots of different reports and lots of distance different statistics saying similar things, but on a more divisive topic, you will be able to find facts that back up an argument. That’s where it gets complex, because you have to think, who’s the source, who’s surveyed that, who has it been paid for? Who’s paid for that survey, or who’s paid for that study? And that’s very complex, because that can be hidden. You don’t always know what the source of that that money is, but people with money know the power of reports and stats and think tanks and how much difference that can make to people’s minds. But you know, you want things upskilling someone to spot fake news, it’s another to spot dark money influencing democratic practices, which is a much muckier, adds a layer to the challenge. Perhaps it

56:16
is hugely challenging. And as a researcher, you’re always asked to state your positionality or your conflicts of interest, make that out loud. But as you were saying, Sean, you know you can read papers, and they’ve been funded by a particular organization or science body that may have an agenda to set, and those papers get funded more, and they’re more in the public eye, and then other research that people can work tirelessly on for decades might not come to the forefront because they simply don’t have the money. And sadly, it does seem to be a situation that money does drive a lot of the information. And again, like think tanks you know, thinking about, well, what’s their motivation? Why are they commissioning this, this information? But I suppose getting back to like, how we discern information ourselves, you know, we could say 20% of the people today walked to the village hall, or we could say, you know, 80% didn’t walk. You know, how do we frame it? And what does that mean? Does it mean that 80% couldn’t get there because, I don’t know, they were not able to drive a car because they were under 16, things like that. You don’t know the full level of information and even work. I’ve been looking at food and farming cycles and the kind of life cycle analysis and sort of came across some figures which looked really interesting. Then I discovered that waste wasn’t amongst that, and it’s like you’ve got to be so careful and always constantly check. And I think that’s why discourse is important amongst people, so that you can actually sort of fully explore all those angles from different perceptions. Yeah,

58:03
sense. It isn’t. It is a very interesting question. You know, what are facts? It’s almost like we need a philosopher in the room to answer that. That question for us. But, you know, we could, this isn’t a new question, right? This is a very old question. It’s an ancient question to some extent. But even in the modern period, right we could think of key examples of the tobacco industry that funded all the studies that showed for years and years and years, smoking is actually quite fine. It’s safe, it’s not going to do you any harm. And then it turns out that, well, in fact, actually, you know, once you take away the tobacco industry money and you fund independent studies, then no, actually, tobacco is not good for you. So, you know, there’s examples of, you know, problematic facts that have been there for quite some, some time. It’s and I guess it also gets to this idea that conspiracy theories, of course, now are are growing and more and more popular, and we see them spreading a lot faster. Sean mentioned the idea that fake news can travel faster than than genuine news or genuine facts. Why is that? Why? Why does Fake News travel faster? Well, because part of it, not the only reason, but part of it will be that those organizations that are purposely set up to generate disinformation, remember, disinformation is the stuff that generated in order to specifically mislead or misinform, or Well, sorry, I used the wrong word there, to disinform, to mislead you with false information that is then spread by the other thing that I mentioned, chatbots or botnets that are designed to spread that information fast. So it’s specifically developed to mislead and then specifically designed to be pushed out and spread very, very quickly. And. It can spread much faster than genuine information. So that doesn’t really actually get at the question of how we determine what’s what’s true and what isn’t there’s plenty of authoritative sources, right? Would be one way of saying there’s basic facts two plus two, right? But beyond that, it’s probably looking at these authoritative sources

1:00:20
Yes, thanks. I just on Yeah. I just wanted to make a point, really, about this question of what is a fact, because I think that it’s basically, I guess I’m saying what Lucy said. But there are lots of facts where there’s no, no one, everyone’s in agreement. We don’t need to go down the long, complicated road of working out whether it’s exactly correct or not so. But when something is controversial, when someone claims this fact and somebody else says, no, no, no, this is the real fact. It is all about who is making the claim from it, and attribution of sources and explaining who these sources are and what they actually do is vital for people to let people make their own minds up. If people know where the information is coming from, I think people generally can come to a pretty reasonable view on whatever the question is be labeled as AI generated. You know that that’s a good example of that. And I think you know like the BBC has been caught out quite often in using information which it hasn’t really been clear on what the source was, and then it describes the organization that produced that information, perhaps not in the most accurate way. So if they just said what the organization was and what it what its role was, and who pays for it, where the money comes from, then I think most people will be going, hmm, right, you know, and not being convinced, as I’ve got the microphone, I’ll just very quickly say something. The other thing is, do you think whether the panel is a good question, whether they think it should be an offense for politicians to lie? Should, you know, Boris Johnson said whatever he wanted to, no, no, come back at all for years and years and years until eventually, his own party ditched him. You know, I think there is a political party that wants to introduce a law on this. I can’t remember now who were fair in 1963 was it? And John Profumo, the defense minister, had to resign because he lied to Parliament and and it was like an absolute outrage and a scandal, and there’s no way he could carry on in his job. Now the politicians lie all the time without any real repercussions, and it’s that, you know, it’s also making young people think, why should I bother caring about anything anyone says? Because everybody’s lying. It’s not that I’m going to believe something that’s not true. It’s I just don’t believe anything. I just couldn’t care less about any of it. So should there be some serious, you know, repercussions on politicians for lying? That’s my question.

1:03:10
Thanks. Yeah, I think it’s a very good question. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of making it illegal for politicians to lie. However, I am very much in favor of we talking about consequences and repercussions, because that’s exactly how, like you say, how trust vanishes. You know, politicians mess up, that’s fine people mess up, but then there are no consequences. And that is, that’s where we really lose trust, and we’ve seen that through the last 510, years, I think, especially doing the Conservative government, because of so many lies happened, and trust just plummeted because people don’t trust it anymore. So I really think those consequences, but that’s what I think is really important. What you’re mentioning there that that needs to be in place is really important. What you’re mentioning there that that needs to be in place, but it can’t be okay to just lie and mislead, and you know, and massive decisions are made on made on these lies. And so I’m very much with you on the repercussion and the consequences. But, and I think that needs to be not needs to be somehow reintroduced and that. And I think somehow reintroduced and that. And I think I feel like the current government is trying. I’m not. I don’t want to be party political. But, you know, people have been asked to leave based on having made mistakes. I’m not sure that would have happened, for example, in the previous government. But yeah, so that kind of, I think that that needs to that’s important on the question of lying, I don’t know. I’ve not thought about that too much. I find it really hard to make that illegal for someone to lie, because we all do it, and it’s so human, like it’s just, we all, I think there’s a start we, like everybody lies 200 times a day, like, it’s not we do it all the time, right? Someone asks you, how you are? You’re like, Yeah, I’m fine, thanks. It’s a lie, but I know it’s true. We’re not politicians. Exactly, you know. So, but so I’m just a bit divided on the legality of it, but I very much agree that they need to be consequences for especially for lies in politics,

1:05:10
summed up brilliantly. I think, yeah, we used to have a press who would hold politicians to account more for lying, and it would be expected, if you had been caught out in a big lie, you would stand down. But I think we have a lot of people, if they are following political ideology, and it could be either either side of the political spectrum, they will not. They will happily put up with lies if it furthers their political aims. And we have a press who will, perhaps, as we’ve seen with the recent government, will attack more certain political people rather than others, and others will get away with the lying. And really, we need to just hold maybe not illegal, but yeah, we definitely need more accountability measures. As you said

1:05:53
thing, I think about lying politicians. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at one of those after dinner speakers books where people get paid a fee of 20,000 pounds or something to come and speak. It’s incredible to see how many sort of former public figures who’ve perhaps lied are within the pages of these books. And why are people paying them money to then trot out their story in books or on the shelves of Tesco? You know, we don’t want to see that kind of thing, and they should have no truck at all if they’re lying, but I don’t. I think, you know, a legislative system maybe it isn’t the right place, because it’s it could be subjective, and there could be, you know, chances where perhaps someone wasn’t lying and was wrongly accused. I mean, there’s situations now in Pakistan where Imran Khan is in jail, for example. I don’t know the full story, but you have situations like that. So we have to write careful about involving legislation. But why should we be paying these people 1000s of pounds to speak after dinner or publish their memoirs?

1:06:49
I think it is crucial to remember that it’s actually it is. Parliamentarians cannot lie when giving official statements in Parliament, right? There are massive repercussions for that. It certainly violates the ministerial code, for instance, for ministers to lie in Parliament, I think you’re sort of thinking a bit more, right, and I totally absolutely share the frustrations when politicians say things that are untrue. But I also get very frustrated when you know you have high profile scandals of untruths, and then you go and there’s an election, and the turnout rate is less than 50% you know, in a democracy, citizens have particular responsibilities. The responsibility of citizens are to be informed, to know, to gather information, to process that information, to think critically about it, and then to use that information in the voting booth. If we’re not using that information in the voting booth, because we’re throwing our hands up and saying, Well, goodness, they’re all They’re all telling lies, so therefore I’m not going to vote for any Well, to some extent, we need to look in the mirror a little bit and say that it is partially our job to hold politicians to account as well. So I’m being provocative, obviously in responding to you in this way. But also media and newspapers also, it’s their job as well to hold politicians to account. We have one in the back, and then we have one in the front.

1:08:25
Sorry, I just want to take up what the lad at the front said. My thing was more manifesto pledges. So we know the Labor Party are about to go back on. It won’t affect us. I don’t think it’s income tax. It looks like they’re going to raise but they are now going to roll back on on their mana. Now that could be something that we could make illegal, because you can, that seems to be the Tories beforehand labor. No one seems to ever stick to a manifesto that they say they’re going to do ever. And that seems like something that we could it seems like a glaring thing that we haven’t talked about today. We’ve talked about AI and stuff, but there is a lot of examples of manifestos never being I mean, one and a half million homes forever, it’s never happened ever.

1:09:04
This is, this is where I put my political science hat on and say, Actually, the research shows that, for the most part, parties do try to follow most of their manifesto pledges. And it’s the high profile ones that we know, but there’s many that they actually do, do try to follow the parties. Would probably come back and say, well, things, things change, times change. You know, things like, you know, covid happened, so we have to do something differently, or something like that. But I totally take that. You know, if it’s a, if it’s a manifesto thing, then again, whose responsibility is it to hold them to account at the next election, do we go and we say, do we remember that in X number of years? Or do we do other things happen, and then the world moves on? It is quite tricky, and it puts a lot of onus on us as citizens in the democracy to deal with that. We have question up front. I’m sorry, Jenny wouldn’t say anything to that.

1:09:59
No. Sir, yeah, I just wanted to address the the accountability question between politicians and individual representation or individual people, because it’s, it seems to me that that’s a gap that’s growing. They’re becoming less accountable, and that’s part of the reason why people don’t, increasingly not trusting government and and by that, I mean is, is that if an individual goes and talks to an MSP or mp or whatever, that person will listen politely. If an individual from, for example, SSE, N from, from the network, from the energy network, goes to talk to that person, they’ll be taken a lot more seriously and and the gap there is huge. I attended a meeting about two months ago where there were 60 Community Councils meeting in Inverness, all expressing huge concerns about the wind farms and the rush of all of these energy projects. And in particular, I believe that a lot of it is technology that literally will will be totally irrelevant in another five to 10 years. But there was no representative from the from the Minister of Energy, whether it’s Hollywood or Westminster. There is no formal organization of Community Councils. So their concerns, even though they were representing 80,000 residents in Scotland, could essentially be dismissed as irrelevant or biased or No, they weren’t really representing their constituents. And when that reaction happens, and the government is following a policy that was decided 10 years ago, and is clearly the momentum is not there and it’s out of date, but at the same time, the ability to make any changes in that momentum is, you know, one gets really frustrated about it and, and I think that’s why there was a lot of people frustrated about or losing faith in government. And I actually, incidentally, in terms of Lucy’s provocation, believe, yes, it should be compulsory to vote.

1:12:13
Come back to that. Did anybody want to come in on on this?

1:12:17
Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s yeah, just, just quickly to that, I would say it’s about, how do we give people power again? How do we give people the feeling of power again, that they’re involved in decisions that affect their local communities, affect the nation? There’s been a lot of talk about citizen assemblies, other types of practices that can involve people in, maybe not the exact scenario you’re talking about, but in general, politics more so that they can feel more power within their own hands, or ability to influence when people with a lot more money than them are having a lot of influence. How you do that is very tricky. It’s done better in other countries, and it perhaps is here, but it’s definitely something that can be developed. But I’m not, you know, I’m not involved in politics to a level to explain how we might do that, but I think it is something we perhaps need to look at.

1:13:03
Sorry, but I say I don’t think it’s, in fact, the question of getting people involved. I think it’s a question of getting politicians to listen.

1:13:13
Yeah, it seems like there’s quite there’s very little hierarchy that can boost people, to amplify their voice. So, you know, if I go as a single person, as you say to SSE n, which I, in fact, did, and after three months now, I still haven’t had an answer back, so I’ve pursued them once again, even sending to elected representatives. They’re overflowed, because they actually are getting AI representations from the organizations, which, of course, you can see people resort to that because they don’t have time and capacity. But then we’re also flooding people with this. So I mean, I know myself, when I was on the campaign trail, I was getting 300 emails a day, and I was responding to every single one of them personally. Sometimes it’s a quick answer. It was a cut and paste. This is what I’ve already said, but I made the point in doing that, and I thought, golly, if I get elected, it’s going to be 10 times this. How am I going to cope? And I just simply don’t know how people are coping, but we need to have better ways of communicating. These citizens assemblies are great. They had a great one for biodiversity. In Ireland, they’re very expensive to run. You’re talking about a million pounds, but that would be a wonderful thing to invest in.

1:14:22
I think there’s several components to that very complex question that you asked. Certainly things about local governance reform is a big issue. I was recently at IPPR event for being in Edinburgh for 10 years, and they one of the crucial elements come out of that was the fact that local governance reform has been promised by many governments and still has yet to be fully realized, and the idea that you have sort of, you know, communities of. Rather substantial size, that that don’t really have that sort of local governance mechanism as problematic because people feel then very distant, you know, from from the those in power. And then I think the other element that sprung to mind, and then, I guess you said this wasn’t exactly what you’re asking about, it did spring to mind in the context of your question is about the mechanisms for citizen engagement in Scotland, and to get those answers and to engage politicians directly. I should confess that I’m a slightly strange animal in that I moved to Scotland because of the Scottish Parliament. You know, I was interested in it. It was really interesting in how it was developed. And so 20 years ago, I came to study the Scottish Parliament, and I stayed. Part of the reason I was so interested in it is when it was set up, it was amazingly innovative in the number of ways that people can be involved in the Scottish Parliament. Anybody can petition the Scottish Parliament. Any single person, almost in the world can petition the Scottish Parliament on any issue that’s devolved to it, and the Scottish Parliament has to consider that petition. They at least have to look at it, think about it. Is this something that the committee has done? Should do? Will do that have been introduced as well. So there’s all sorts of the problem is nobody knows about them. Nobody knows about these. Really, I can petition, and it’s absolutely different from the Westminster petition system. For instance, cross party groups are very inclusive, very broadly. So there’s all sorts of ways for people to be involved, to try to get those answers. They won’t always get them. Politicians have variety of reasons for not giving direct answers, but there are ways to try to go about doing that, and we don’t use them as much as we as we really could, I think, and as effectively as we could as citizens of the country.

1:16:52
Fraser Marie from online has asked, what is the role of freedom of speech in promoting democracy and combating disinformation. Surely, it’s at least as important as regulation and skills development.

1:17:08
That’s a small question. Who wants to see

1:17:18
situations where we see 900 people at a time being arrested outside our parliament, and I think we need to question things like that.

1:17:28
Yeah. I mean, freedom of speech is something that we have to absolutely stand up for, and it’s something you know as an aside, it’s something that’s become more and more challenging in libraries. At the moment, libraries in the states have seen a rise in censorship requests of certain books, and, you know, books being taken off shelves. And that’s not just from always the right hand side of politics. It comes from from for a variety of reasons. So yeah, we need to stand up for freedom of speech and make sure that that is protected. But you know, every situation, every situation that gets in the media that’s connected to freedom of speech will have complexities to it that are not that you can’t legislate or make a really clear policy on any of this, because there will always be something more to these things, and you have to work through every situation. And again, it comes down to ethics, it comes down to skills, it comes down to understanding and empowering the public to be able to deal with these things.

1:18:18
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Freedom of speech is absolutely crucial in all these debates again and having different opinions and really debating things. I think the two things that come to mind for me is first, freedom of speech. And I read this somewhere else, I didn’t make this up myself. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of scrutiny, so we still need to be able to question each other. I think that’s often, you know, often, if you’re not like I’m allowed to say whatever I want. You can’t take away my freedom to speech. Like, no, that’s not it. It’s about scrutinizing what you said, and we’ll talk about it. And I think that’s kind of get lost a little bit in especially in a social media culture and the way things are debated. And the second point of freedom of speech, what I would say as well, is that we are already now not allowed to say everything everywhere at any point in time, and that’s good we have, like a doctor lying to me, for example, that wouldn’t be acceptable, right? Like, there are moments where it’s absolutely okay that you can’t just say anything you want. I censor myself at work. I’m a different person at work than I am at home. And I think we probably all are. You know, we already restrict ourselves in what we say in which situation, what we feel safe to say in which situation. And I think that’s good, but at the same time, we need to have freedom of speech, and especially in the political sense, where we talk about openly debating issues and about what is truth and what is fact, and how do we restrict social media misinformation, all of these things. So, yes, absolutely, freedom of speech, but keeping in mind that there are already restrictions to that, and some of those restrictions are good,

1:19:49
yeah, it sort of brings to mind the with great power comes great responsibility, sort of thing, right? That, yes, we have freedom of speech, but you know, as citizens, we should. Use that, use that responsibly. I suppose, just what springs to mind with that question is, so I’m part of the Scottish election study team. So we are funded by the economic Social Research Council, and we run the surveys before and after the Scottish Parliament elections, and then we run these periodic monitoring, opinion monitoring surveys. We recently just ran one where we did a battery of questions which builds on or is related to a classic set of questions measuring political tolerance. This goes back to people from Sullivan, Pearson Marcus did these things back in the 60s. And basically you ask people, here’s a list of groups. We give them three on the left, three on the right, pick a group that you particularly like. They respond. Then you say, pick a group that you don’t like, and they respond. And then the way that this goes is you ask them a series of questions, basically about the group that they said they don’t like. And you ask them, should that group be able to hold rallies in public? Should that group be able to wave their flag in public? Should members of that group be allowed to teach in secondary schools? We asked this of Scots, which we like to think of ourselves as being quite tolerant to people, don’t we? You know, we’re far more tolerant than those English down south, for instance. Of the Does anybody want to guess what percentage of people said that their disliked group should members of that group should not be allowed to teach it 80% 80% on both in this the reason this spring to mind partially from what Sean was saying on people who said that they didn’t like groups on the right and people who said that they didn’t like groups on the left, It came out at 80% on each side, saying that people from their dislike groups. And by the dislike groups, we mentioned things like, you know people who protest outside abortion clinics, or, you know people who LGBT marchers. So, you know, we gave sort of reasonable sorts of groups. We didn’t come up with the most sort of extreme that you could think of. So there is this question, you know, on both the right and the left, about tolerating things speech that we that we disagree with, and it is something that we need to reflect on probably a bit. Are there other questions in the room we are have we’re running down on our clock. I wanted to make sure if there’s anything else in the room, one here, and then hopefully we can have one of the room and then one online.

1:22:51
Yet, good evening. I would like to say, first of all, the best news I’ve heard is that you’re going to school tomorrow. The school really needs your information. It’s been a pleasure to listen to you this evening. We had an amusing evening here some months back, with Myra black talking about parliament. The end of her evening, there was a lot of laughter. It was very popular. She actually said, the only secret is you must vote. So do we make it compulsory? The way things are at the moment? I think we might need to, because apparently, freedom, democracy, people become complacent. I think the children at school have a market of schooling, but unfortunately, I think they think it’s their right. It’s not a right, it’s a value that’s being created by their predecessors. And the right to vote is a value that’s created by their predecessors. And if we don’t use it, it becomes useless, and we don’t need democracy if we’re not.

1:24:08
Thank you. I actually had the honor of reading out Mario blocks name when she graduated from the University of Glasgow. I was head of school at the time. Does anybody Lucy, I think we can guess your position on this, but

1:24:22
I think the Criminal Justice Act that was what inspired me into sort of activism as a young person growing up in late 80s, 90s, and we felt that our right to express ourselves through outdoor parties, things like that, weren’t being heard, and became more politically engaged, politically engaged in saving the planet from destruction, fossil fuels, so on. I feel that we’re probably in a situation now where things are tolerable or good enough, but the biggest priority for young people is the cost of living, crisis, and if you’re hungry or if things are really bad, you’ve got no problem. Aspects, no job, you even graduate from university. You’re applying for 100 jobs. You don’t get them. You haven’t got the headspace to engage with the political system

1:25:12
on the point of compulsory completely agree with what Lucy says there, and I think compulsory voting. I mean, I purely personal opinion. I’m not sure why we don’t, but I can see, I’ve seen, I’ve spent time in Australia recently, and they seem to run compulsory voting quite effectively. But I don’t know why we don’t have it. I’m sure there’s people smarter than me that could explain why we don’t, but I do think there would be good reasons for it.

1:25:36
The only thing I would add is, if we do have compulsory voting, that needs to come with a whole host of other measures, like proper citizen education. And you know, you can’t just expect people to vote and then, but then they get all their information from Tiktok, from from various channels of their relatives or something. So I think there needs to be, then a whole shift in mindset, and especially around citizenship education, not just for young people to support that and make that actually valuable, because I think just votes in themselves, I’m not they need to be informed votes, right? They need to be votes that people actually believe in what they’re doing, and not just go and make a cross, because they have to. That would be my thought on that, with

1:26:16
rights coming responsibilities exactly come back to that. Unfortunately, I think we are just about out of time, and I will say thank you, but I’m going to turn it over, turn the microphone back to Dez to bring us to a close. So thank you very much everyone.

1:26:32
Thank you very much. We are out of town, but please thank everyone that was a brilliantly rich discussion, and what fantastic panel. Thank you Chris Ellie Sean and Lucy. Thank you to the community association for having us here. Thank you to the RSE staff, Fraser Jess and ashita, who’s not been able to join us in Edinburgh. Thank you to our AV team at the back, who have been working brilliantly, and thank you all of you and all of you online for participating in this. This has been an immensely rich experience, and I really hope we can try and make a difference as we move forward. And I’m delighted we’re going to the school tomorrow. We look forward to going to the school and spending an hour with the students tomorrow, and of course, many of them will have a vote for the first time, which is very exciting. Everyone, please join me again in thanking everyone for this fantastic evening. Applause.