Two years ago, at a virtual rally hosted by the Nobel Foundation, Sheldon Himmelfarb spoke to world leaders just as scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documented the global impact of carbon emissions. scholars should work together to study misinformation.
The new group met in Washington on Wednesday for a formal announcement, uniting more than 200 researchers from 55 countries with a sense of urgency and vigilance similar to the threat of global warming. In the group’s first report, researchers questioned the effectiveness of combating misinformation online using content moderation, one of the most popular strategies for combating misinformation. He said there was more scientific evidence for other tactics.
“We have to approach the information environment in the same way that scientists approach the environment,” says Peacetech Lab, executive director of the group and an affiliate of the US Institute for Peace in Washington. said Himelfarb, who is also the chief executive of .
The establishment of this group, called the International Panel on the Information Environment, is registered as a non-governmental organization in Zurich and the fight against misinformation has become increasingly bogged down in a widespread loss of trust in governments, the press and the rest of the public. It was done while I was addicted to it. institution.
“Algorithmic bias, manipulation and misinformation are global and existential threats that exacerbate existing social problems, undermine public livelihoods, paralyze humanitarian efforts, and hinder progress on other serious threats. ,” the commission said in its initial announcement.
The panel was presented at a three-day conference hosted by the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences on the theme of declining public understanding and trust in science.
One conference speaker after another described the onslaught of disinformation, which has become an alarming fact of public life around the world and could soon be exacerbated by the recent explosion of artificial intelligence.
2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa of the Philippines manifest It calls on democratic governments and big tech companies to be more transparent, do more to protect personal data and privacy, and end practices that lead to disinformation and other threats to independent journalism. There are 276 signatories representing over 140 organizations.
One of the challenges facing these efforts is overcoming the growing debate over what exactly is misinformation. In the United States, efforts to counter the First Amendment’s protection of free speech have stalled. Despite the emergence of new platforms that promise to do away with content moderation policies, major companies are now shifting focus and resources away from fighting misinformation.
On Wednesday, researchers on the panel reviewed 4,798 peer-reviewed publications examining misleading information on social media and outlined the first two studies summarizing findings on the effectiveness of its countermeasures. announced.
The findings suggest that the most effective response to online misinformation is to label content as “controversial” or flagged sources in state media, usually debunking rumors and disinformation. It suggests that it is to publish the correction information in the form of
Public and government efforts to pressure social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to remove content, as well as the effectiveness of internal algorithms to suspend or downplay violating accounts, are far less certain, the report argues. ing. The same applies to media literacy programs that train people to identify sources of misinformation.
“I’m not saying that information literacy programs don’t work,” says Professor Sebastian Valenzuela of Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University, who oversaw the study. “What we’re saying is we need more evidence that they work.”
The inspirational model for this panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was established in 1988 when climate change was an equal battle. Scientists working under the auspices of the United Nations struggled for decades before UN assessments and recommendations were accepted as scientific consensus.
When it comes to the digital environment and the impact of abuse on society, the science of disinformation can prove even more difficult to measure specifically. Young Mi Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vice-chair of the Committee on Research Methods, says climate change is “hard science.”
“So it’s relatively easy to develop some common concepts and toolkits,” Kim said. “It’s hard to do that in the social sciences and humanities.”
The new commission sidesteps the role of government, at least for now. Instead of issuing periodic reports to fact-check individual falsehoods, it plans to explore the deeper forces behind the spread of misinformation as a means of guiding government policy.
Philip N. Howard, director of the University of Oxford’s Program on Democracy and Technology and chairman of the new commission, said that “a large body of science is needed to assess the truthful claims contained in a particular piece of junk. It’s too difficult to send people,” he said.
“What we can do is look for interference with infrastructure,” he continued. “What we can do is audit algorithmic systems to see if they have bad or unintended consequences. ”
