How to Combat Disinformation

01-13-2024

Roger Berkowitz

In a long essay on the dangers and challenges of AI generated disinformation, Hannah Murphy pretty much gives up. She ends her essay arguing that there may simply be no way to combat such advanced disinformation. 

The technology is here to stay and will get very, very good,” says Nicolas Müller, machine-learning research scientist at Fraunhofer AISEC. “You will probably not be able to just trust media like audio or video. This will need a paradigm shift in our head. Maybe, like Covid, we just have to live with it.

Murphy also argues that certain companies like X (formerly Twitter) are not doing enough to combat disinformation. In one line, Murphy writes of Twitter's Community Notes approach:

Experts say disinformation campaigns have shifted their attention to companies that take a lighter approach towards moderation. In particular, X and Telegram is where “a lot of this stuff originates now because [perpetrators] know that the legacy platforms are putting resources into this,” notes Harbath. X said it was “well-equipped to handle” synthetic and manipulated media, and pointed to its volunteer fact-checking programme, Community Notes.

Community Notes, the renamed version of Birdwatch, is based on the open source software from Pol.is that is currently being used in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Finland to drive crowd-sourced democratic input on policy innovations. 

As Carl Miller writes, X’s Community Notes uses the pol.is software to allow user-based feedback to be sorted and recommended by algorithms that prioritize broad-cross-partisan consensus rather than popularity. 

Attempts to protect the messy, contested truth online are never straightforward, but Community Notes has a deceptively simple design. Once a user joins the project, they can propose that a short note of context be added to any tweet, perhaps correcting an error or plugging an important omission.

Other users can then rate the helpfulness of the note and any others suggested by users. When a famous account like that of Elon Musk posts a grandstanding tweet, the best note is automatically selected to appear on the post as it circulates around Twitter, like a contextualizing alter ego or digital conscience.

That might sound more likely to create problems than solve them. Isn’t the crowd what has made social media so partisan? But Twitter made the crucial decision to surface notes not by simply selecting the most popular, but those that win the broadest consensus. That approach was inspired in part by a platform called Polis—used in Taiwan to crowdsource the creation of new laws—that is among the few examples of technologies shown to coax agreement out of online debate.

We featured pol.is software at the 2022 Hannah Arendt Center Conference during a talk by pol.is’ founder, Colin Megill.