Misinformation on the internet is an everyone problem. To combat it, publishers, social media and people need to find new ways of working together.
In a time of heightened political polarization and widespread social media use, the prevalence of misinformation online is a persistent problem, with increasingly serious effects on elections and the stability of governments around the world. I will put my Facebook account and most of my my social networks on hold. Moving the conversation to a safer platform such as “signal” for the moment, and being selective to what news to event, to read or look at.
There is a gap between the information news organizations possess and the subset of that information to which their users have access. That’s especially true when that media travels around the internet, largely stripped of its original context.
Especially on Facebook, where trolls and bad actors have established many tools for misleading people, generally using authentic photos and videos as source material. Some of the techniques are simple: recycling old images, selective cropping and editing, slowing down and speeding up videos, and so on. Other techniques are more sophisticated, involving the creation of “synthetic” media such as deepfakes.
Regardless of the complexity of these actions, they contribute to misinformation, extremist propaganda and undemocratic governmental changes, but in being designed to go viral, many people unwittingly spread it within their own Facebook networks.
If you believe in democracy one should see The Great Hack. It is about the Trump campaign, the Leave.EU campaign and many other reckless electoral adventures all over the world and their connection with Cambridge Analytica, the British data research company that cunningly harvested information from millions of Facebook users and their friends via an innocuous-seeming “personality” questionnaire.