New Warning System For False Information
April 24, 2020
False information, fake news, and disinformation have been popular words in the American vocabulary since Trump’s 2016 presidential win. Back in 2016 and to the current day, disinformation spreads faster than wildfire due to social media platforms, bots, and people determined to spread lies. Science Magazine explores one way to fight false information in the article, “Researchers Develop Early Warning System To Fight Disinformation Online.”
A University of Notre Dame research team developed an early warning system using AI designed to identify edited images, fake videos, and other false information online. The project’s goal is to catch social media campaigns that are meant to trigger violence and ruin democratic elections. The project is headed by personnel from Notre Dame’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
The team collected over two million images and other content about the Indonesian 2019 general election from Instagram and Twitter. They discovered that there were spontaneous and coordinated campaigns on social media started to ignite violence and influence the election.
These campaigns use classic propaganda techniques and are dangerous:
“Those campaigns consisted of manipulated images exhibiting false claims and misrepresentation of incidents, logos belonging to legitimate news sources being used on fabricated news stories and memes created with the intent to provoke citizens and supporters of both parties. While the ramifications of such campaigns were evident in the case of the Indonesian general election, the threat to democratic elections in the West already exists. The research team at Notre Dame, comprised of digital forensics experts and specialists in peace studies, said they are developing the system to flag manipulated content to prevent violence, and to warn journalists or election monitors of potential threats in real time.”
The disinformation detecting system is built to be scalable so users can configure it to monitor different content. Current problems the research team is experiencing are figuring out how to optimize scalability for ingestion and processing to deliver fast results.
The newest decade in the twenty-first century might be dubbed the “disinformation age,” because of the false information circulating the Web. Some of it is harmless, but anyone who deals with trolls knows that it does not take much to ignite mob mentality on the Internet.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
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