Euronews just posted an article about the recent “deep-fake” video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling on Ukrainian citizens to surrender. The fake video was viewed over 120,000 times on Twitter and is another example of how misinformation/disinformation is used to intentionally manipulate the public and can lead to extreme consequences. Deepfakes are videos edited using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning techniques to replicate the face and voice of a person to create a false narrative. Good deep fakes can be seemingly authentic and harder for the public to spot as false. “Videos made through such technologies are almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones,” the authority said in […]

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a request for information (RFI) on Federal Priorities for Information Integrity Research and Development. The purpose of the RFI is to gain input on how to “enable research and development activities to advance the trustworthiness of information, mitigate the effects of information manipulation, and foster an environment of trust and resilience in which individuals can be discerning consumers of information.” There is so much information on the internet these days and so few ways for the general public to verify what is true and what is not. This has […]

Nadya Bliss, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI), was recently interviewed by her local CBS affiliate station on tracking how misinformation and disinformation spreads on social media and why, in recent years, it is spreading more rapidly.  “Around events that are changing really rapidly, the information ecosystem is particularly sensitive to all kinds of noise. Whether it’s misinformation without intent or disinformation with intent,” Bliss said. “It’s very difficult for an individual to be able to parse everything and we’re very susceptible. We’re in this moment where we are consistently checking, which makes us more vulnerable. False information tends to spread […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas interviews Dr. Nadya Bliss, the Executive Director of Arizona State’s Global Security Initiative and a CCC Council Member. Before joining ASU in 2012, Bliss spent 10 years at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as a founding group leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. In this episode, she discusses the work of Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative, how to combat the spread of misinformation and the impact of sustainability on security. Enjoy. You can stream the episode in the embedded player below or find it on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Blubrry | iHeartRadio | Youtube. If you […]

Over the last twenty years, the proliferation of Internet access, coupled with the explosion of online social networks, has allowed people around the world to share their ideas and experiences with the click of a button. Beauty vloggers craft YouTube tutorials, gamers stream their performances live over Twitch, and journalists share and source news from across the world through Twitter. This web of content is always expanding—much of the information within it is true, however, plenty of it is not. How can we determine fact from fiction in this rapidly shifting information landscape? In response to these emerging concerns the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the Detecting, Combating, and Identifying […]

Misinformation during a national emergency is not new. In this current health crisis, the “coronavirus pandemic is generating a tidal wave of information—some of it accurate, some not so much—that has saturated social and traditional media,” as was stated in Science Magazine last week.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a session at AAAS called Detecting, Combating, and Identifying Dis and Mis-information. One of the speakers was Emma Spiro (University of Washington), who spoke on Misinformation in the Context of Emergencies and Disaster Events. Rumors, defined by Spiro as a “story that is unverified at the time of communication,” are widely spread during crisis events as people seek out […]