How to be a Civil Servant in the Disinformation Age

“We need to be braver about transparency to build public trust. If you don’t provide the information, a conspiracy theorist will.” – Charlie Boundy, chief data officer, Companies House

Digital government isn’t about automated forms anymore. Recent trends in social media combined with AI mean that there is a proliferation of disinformation impacting us all in government, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Our role is to fight this with facts and be brave about transparency. That also means we need to be more media literate, as well as digital and data savvy.

We need to:

1. Counter false narratives with our own data, facts and evidence
2. Work closely with our comms teams
3. Be brave about transparency to build public trust

Countering false narratives with evidence

We live in an age of increasing mistrust and conspiracy theories. The Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee’s Future of News report predicts the news environment fracturing along social, regional and economic lines in the next 5-10 years. There is a real risk of a two-tier world of paywalled professional journalism vs ‘dangerously’ unreliable online sources.

Data quality and data governance are important as public sector data is a strategic national resource. Analytics and AI are vital to improve the quality of outcomes to support growth, improve services and find efficiencies. We need to proactively measure and evidence those outcomes to be ready to counter false narratives.

Working with comms teams

Enhanced media, data and digital literacy helps us to understand who is generating the news and how to counter misinformation and disinformation. Where influencers and bots are amplifying outrage, we need to be prepared to respond with attention-grabbing narratives of our own.

Being braver about transparency

We need to be braver about transparency to build public trust. If we aren’t telling the story, the public will construct their own narratives. DWP’s personal information charter and the Companies House strategic intelligence assessment are two examples of ways of doing this.

The proposed legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities means that civil service data professionals need to provide facts and evidence. And in some cases, we will need to practise what we might call ‘honest uncertainty’. We should be honest when we do not know something.

Transparency is the basis of trust. If you don’t provide the information, a conspiracy theorist will.