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– Incorrect and misleading information currently practiced, by groups or individually, is increasingly becoming a social and political problem.
Minapim by Hernan Valenzuela:Massive disinformation “fakenews”in some countries is attributed to coordinated group movements. While I write this article, Twitter and Facebook block accounts in China, Brazil, Russia and Turkey. The ongoing responses do not necessarily indicate an integrated strategy for society, on the contrary, what we see is a very fragmented response.
At the international level, the problem is addressed in cooperation with EU member states, as well as with NATO and the G7. Machine learning methods can help to identify misinformation, as long as there is enough data to train the algorithm.
Machine learning in the context of fakenews “will only be successful if large amounts of texts and other media that have been recognized as disinformation are collected in the databases and annotated accordingly”.
For now this base is missing. So far, the lack of internal coordination by governments or authorities has been shown to respond to “fire situations”. Several countries adopt differentiated measures, planned or unplanned, to prevent the spread of false news.
Promising approaches in other countries
Things look different in other countries, Finland is an example of how disinformation is taught in different school subjects. Adult education should also not be overlooked. In Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, there are many so-called voluntary elves online who want to combat misinformation and ‘troll’ propaganda. It is not a question of excluding misinformation, but of discovering, questioning and fighting it.
Disinformation is also a higher political priority in other countries; in Britain, several specially created parliamentary committees took up the issue.
Taiwan’s experience
The spread of false information is digitally measured and immediately tackled. Possible “false news” is verified by the responsible ministry, ministries are supported by a broad and committed community of FactFinders, who not only can report false reports, but also generally provide a correction with sources directly.
Taiwan’s example is that, until now, it has apparently been avoided to rely heavily and exclusively on the exclusion of “supposedly fakenews”, whatever the risk of censorship that censorship may bring.
On the contrary, it is about allowing technical solutions, as a citizen platform, to quickly find misinformation and counter-speech. This practice speeds up the verification of facts via crowdsourcing (group information gathering work).
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