European elections have shown that the hunt of newspapers and public warnings in advance can help voters avoid campaigns that don’t bring information. But the battle with fake news may still be a cat-and-cat game between its suppliers and companies that have the platform they exploit.
Whether amateurs, criminals, or governments, many organizations – both domestic and foreign – have the skills to reverse the way the technology platform analyzes information.
Because of the huge amount of online information, people often feel overwhelmed and difficult to wonder what to focus on. Instead of information, incarnation and attention have become elusive. Big data and AI target micro into communication so that the information that people receive is limited to a sophisticated “filter bubble” of like-minded people.
People have proven that outrageous but misguided news will attract more viewers than accurate news. A study showed that such news on Twitter is likely to be 70% more forward than accurate news, and also create the most revenue. Actual tests with conventional media are often unable to keep up, and can sometimes be counterproductive when attracting more people to false information.
In essence, the ability of a profitable social media model to become a weapon of nations and non-national subjects is the same.
An arms race will continue between social media companies, states and non-governmental entities that have invested in the exploitation of their systems. Technology solutions such as artificial intelligence are not the key to solving all problems. Because these solutions are often sensational and outrageous, making fake news go further and faster than real news. Misinformation on Twitter is reused by many people and is much faster than real information, and repeating it even in the context of actual testing can increase the ability to accept fish information.
To prepare for the 2016 US presidential election, Internet Research Agency St. Petersburg, Russia, spent more than a year creating dozens of fake social media accounts like local US press agencies.
In any case, the damage caused by foreign actors may be less than the damage we cause to ourselves. The problem of “fake news” and foreign impersonation from reliable sources is difficult to resolve because it involves trade-offs between important values. Social media companies need to be vigilant when attacked to censor information for accuracy.
European elections have shown that the search for newspapers and public warnings in advance can help voters avoid campaigns that do not bring information.
But the fight with fake news may still be a cat-and-cat game between its suppliers and companies that have the platform they exploit. It will become part of the noisy elections everywhere. To protect our democracies, constant vigilance is indispensable.
In general, the current development of AI is not transparent enough to earn trust from people. With rules and orders, what the AIWS is working on, or ethical frameworks, which Michael Dukakis is building with AIWS Initiative, we can take a step closer to transparency and ethics in AI development.