We live in a new world. A world where information can spread fast and without any regard to accuracy. Our challenge as individual citizens is to somehow identify the disinformation from the actual information.
Kate Starbird and her team from the University of Washington spend time studying this problem and the impact disinformation can have on society. Starbird recently gave a keynote address at the National Science Foundation 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigator’s Meeting (SaTC PI meeting ’19) in Alexandria, VA on “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work.
As Starbird said in her talk:
Disinformation is not simply false information or just about “bots” or “trolls.” It targets, inflates, cultivates, shapes, and ultimately leverages online communities (or “unwitting crowds”) to further its spread and achieve its objectives…Identifying disinformation is not merely about determining the truth value of a single piece of information but about interring the intent (to mislead) is a collection of information actions.
One consequence is that this problem was not going to go away anytime soon. If anything, since the first time I heard Starbird talk at the Computing Research Association’s Snowbird Conference in July 2018 on Muddied Waters: Online Disinformation during Crisis Events, she only has more data to study.
When you think about it, disinformation can be absolutely terrifying. As Starbird pointed out, it has the ability to undermine a democratic society and really push you to question what you think you know. She recommended that we should reconsider our unit of analysis for disinformation, as disinformation is not a single piece of information but rather a campaign.
Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has gotten into this space as well. In March 2019, we held a Misinformation Roundtable that brought together computer scientists along with experts from disciplines that included electrical engineering, psychology, marketing, information science, and political science to discuss challenges in detecting and countering misinformation. It was CCC’s first step towards laying out a research agenda around this topic. We are continuing the conversation at AAAS 2020 in Seattle in February 15th at 10 AM with a session called Detecting, Combating, and Identifying Dis and Mis-information. One of the speakers is Starbird’s collaborator, Emma Spiro (University of Washington). Other speakers include Dan Gillmor (ASU) and John Beieler (ODNI).
