Abstract
Chapter 1 frames the problem of deceptive, inaccurate, and misleading information in the digital media content and information technologies as an infodemic. Mis- and disinformation proliferate online, yet the solution remains elusive and many of us run the risk of being woefully misinformed in many aspects of our lives including health, finances, and politics. Chapter 1 untangles key research concepts—infodemic, mis- and disinformation, deception, “fake news,” false news, and various types of digital “fakes.” A conceptual infodemiological framework, the Rubin (2019) Misinformation and Disinformation Triangle, posits three minimal interacting factors that cause the problem—susceptible hosts, virulent pathogens, and conducive environments. Disrupting interactions of these factors requires greater efforts in educating susceptible minds, detecting virulent fakes, and regulating toxic environments. Given the scale of the problem, technological assistance as inevitable. Human intelligence can and should be, at least in part, enhanced with an artificial one. We require systematic analyses that can reliably and accurately sift through large volumes of data. Such assistance comes from artificial intelligence (AI) applications that use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). These fields are briefly introduced and AI-enabled tasks for detecting various “fakes” are laid out. While AI can assist us, the ultimate decisions are obviously in our own minds. An immediate starting point is to verify suspicious information with simple digital literacy steps as exemplified here. Societal interventions and countermeasures that help curtail the spread of mis- and disinformation online are discussed throughout this book.
There has never been, nor will there ever be, a technological innovation that moves us away from the essential problems of human nature.
(Broussard, 2019, p. 8)
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Notes
- 1.
See Canada’s National Observer (2019) “Five Step Guide: How to Spot Fake News” via https://www.nationalobserver.com/spot-fake-news (accessed on March 16, 2021).
- 2.
What I mean by affordances here is actions that are possible within a given environment, referring to what users can do within the parameters of a particular technology, like what the features of a cellphone afford you to do.
- 3.
See, for example, www.nytimes.com in the US, www.bbc.co.uk in the UK, or www.cbc.ca in Canada.
- 4.
This suite of working proof-of-concept applications is freely accessible on GitHub for anyone to download and experiment with.
- 5.
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Rubin, V.L. (2022). The Problem of Misinformation and Disinformation Online. In: Misinformation and Disinformation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95656-1_1
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