Dr Scott A Hale presented these slides at the 2019 News Impact Summit in Lyon, France, hosted by The European Journalism Centre and Google News Initiative https://newsimpact.io/summits/news-impact-summit-lyon

1. Big tech & disinformation
What are the main threats and how can journalists
counter them to protect democracy?
Dr Scott A. Hale, @computermacgyve

2. Which do you trust?

3. Which do you trust?
Icons made by Freepik at Flaticon

4. Social media full of social information
about who is doing what

5. and content spreads fast!
Social science theory
Empirical: YouTube views
Margetts et al. 2015, Political Turbulence

6. Not all content is true, but not all untruths are harmful
University of Hong Kong
FullFact Pagoda of Harms

7. What should platforms do?
● Ignore the content: platforms should not decide what is “right”
● Warn users sharing / seeing content
● Limit algorithmic recommendation
● Take content down
● Ban repeat offenders
● Ban political advertising

8. Encrypted messaging systems
How can we study / counter misinformation on closed
systems?
Discover and join groups with links on the web?
–> Privacy concerns
Operate “tip lines”?
–> Need technology to scale
(e.g., spam, match images and text; distribute work)

9. 1 in 4 WhatsApp messages
contained multimedia content
Resende, et al. 2019. In WWW.
Examining Brazilian WhatsApp groups
Despite representing less than 1% of
all images shared, [known misinfo
images] appeared in 44% of the
monitored groups in the period of
the election
False

10. For misinfo images, 35%
were shared first on the
WhatsApp group,
45% … were shared first on
the Web
Resende, et al. 2019. In WWW.

11. Hateful content is a major challenge for human-led research
Fact checkers are often not warned
about disturbing content that
circulates on WhatsApp and can be
submitted via tip lines or present in
research datasets.

12. Countering misinformation
Empower journalists to collaboratively
respond fact-check content at scale
with the help of bots (filtering spam,
grouping similar content, running
reverse image search, … )
Enable greater research and dialogue
across platforms, academics, NGOs,
and media organisations

13. Countering misinformation
Empower journalists to collaboratively
respond fact-check content at scale
with the help of bots (filtering spam,
grouping similar content, running
reverse image search, … )
Enable greater research and dialogue
across platforms, academics, NGOs,
and media organisations

14. Thank You
Dr Scott A. Hale
@computermacgyve