Unmasking Misinformation
Transcriber: Eunice Tan
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Wouldn’t it be great
if there were such a thing
as a misinformation mask?
A mask that would protect us
from being infected by false information
and from spreading it
to others unknowingly,
just like we do to protect
ourselves from COVID.
The analogy is not a stretch.
The first law of misinformation
is “we’re all vulnerable” -
we’re all vulnerable to believing
and spreading false information.
Unfortunately, unlike COVID,
there is no mask to filter information,
and nor can we expect a vaccine.
Yes, we need to hold government
and tech companies accountable -
and that’s another story -
but we can’t rely solely on the efforts
of others to solve this problem.
And that means that we as individuals
need to play an active role
in reducing the spread
and impact of misinformation.
So the mask?
We can forget about it.
I’m a research scientist
at the University of Washington
Information School
and co-founder of the Center
for an Informed Public,
a university-wide effort
to study misinformation
and strengthen democratic discourse.
Let’s start with something
currently in the news:
the killing of George Floyd
and the anti-racism protests
that have swept the country.
This is an issue
that hits close to home too.
My daughter is Black,
and there’s been a lot of misinformation
targeting the Black community.
Now, sometimes people
are simply misinformed,
and this happens all the time
but especially at the outset
of an event like this or COVID,
when there’s a vacuum of good information,
creating a ripe environment
for rumors to spread.
I’ve had to gently correct
family and friends
who have come to me with false information
about Seattle, where I live.
Having these conversations
can be a bit uncomfortable,
but it’s tolerable,
and actually they’re important.
After all, we’re all vulnerable,
and that’s how I approach
these conversations.
On the other end of the spectrum
are conspiracies and extreme views.
There are stories that the killing
of George Floyd was staged
or that it was financed to trigger riots
or that he’s not even dead.
I don’t have anybody in my network
who believes these,
but common sense tells us
if you have an issue like this,
and one person’s a believer
of these conspiracies
and another one isn’t,
that conversation isn’t going to go well.
It’s between these two ends
of the spectrum
that are the most problematic
and challenging forms of misinformation:
the half-truths, the plausible narratives,
the believable stories that can
and do change people’s minds,
sometimes leading them
down a path to extremism.
The individuals and organized groups
that are behind these stories,
they’re doing so
with the intent to deceive.
This is what we call
a disinformation campaign.
Disinformation is the intentional
spread of false information,
motivated by some political,
social, financial, or other agenda.
Let’s take a look at an example.
[ANTIFA America
@ANTIFA_US - ALERT]
This tweet purports to belong
to a national antifa organization.
The logo looks real,
the account name looks real,
the content very plausible.
If you took this at face value,
you’d think that this organization
was behind the protest
and working to bring chaos
to white communities.
In fact, this account was proven
to belong to a white nationalist group,
and using pretty straightforward tactics,
they were able to get this message
spread far and wide.
And who could blame someone
for believing that this was authentic?
After all, we’re all vulnerable.
So what can we do about it?
By now, nearly everyone knows
what misinformation is.
It’s headline news;
it’s in people’s social media feeds.
But few people understand
how misinformation works.
And the main point of my talk
is we all need to learn the basics.
We need to develop an understanding
of how individuals and organized groups
use technology and exploit social media
platforms to spread misinformation,
like the tweet I just showed.
We also need to develop some
better information behaviors ourselves.
One I like a lot is “slow down”:
Pause before sharing something online.
We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
Let’s look at some examples.
We’re going to start with the eyes:
Yes, they can deceive.
Here are two close-ups of faces.
Guess what?
Only one of them is real;
the other is computer-generated.
[whichfaceisreal.com]
These photos are from an online quiz
called “Which Face Is Real?”
created by my colleagues
Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom
to build awareness about
the power of artificial intelligence.
The technology to create these images
is now easily accessible.
One can generate thousands of these images
and use them to, for instance,
create fake social media accounts.
In case you were wondering,
the one on the left is computer-generated.
Let’s look at another,
more recent technology:
deepfakes.
Deepfakes are what you get
when you combine artificial intelligence
with machine learning
to create audio and video of people
saying and doing things they never did.
Here’s a clip:
It’s called “In Event of Moon Disaster.”
It was created by MIT this year
as an art and educational project.
[Project Name: In Event of Moon Disaster
Directors: Francesca Panetta,
Halsey Burgund
Production: MIT Center
for Advanced Virtuality]
(Video) Richard Nixon:
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
Fate has ordained that the men
who went to the moon to explore in peace
will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
For every human being who looks up
at the moon in the nights to come
will know that there is some corner
of another world that is forever mankind.
Good night.
Chris Coward: Obviously,
that speech never occurred.
In case you need a history refresher,
the moon landing was a success!
Until now, this form of media manipulation
has mostly targeted individuals
or been used for entertainment purposes.
However, we’ve also seen
the emergence of deepfakes
influencing politics and elections
in other countries.
Could deepfakes be a factor in America’s
upcoming presidential election?
It’s possible, and many experts think so.
In cooperation with Microsoft,
we just launched an online quiz
called “Spot Deepfakes”
to raise awareness about this technology.
I hope you’ll check it out.
Moving on, people not only
say and do things they never did,
they may not even be people.
Enter the world of social media bots.
Social media bots are accounts
that have been programmed
to generate messages, follow other users,
retweet their messages.
It’s relatively easy, again, to create
thousands and millions of bots
and unleash them onto the internet.
Let’s look at some examples.
Again, we’ll stick with the topic of race.
This is a retweet network graph
of the Black Lives Matter discourse
back in 2016.
It was created
by my colleague Kate Starbird
along with Emma Spiro and their students.
[Retweet Network Graph]
What it shows is two communities:
the pink - pro Black Lives Matter;
and green - anti Black Lives Matter.
As you can see, the conversation
was divided into two echo chambers,
with each community retweeting and sharing
messages of like-minded members.
Now, let’s add the impact
of a disinformation campaign.
[Retweet Network Graph]
Here we have the same graph,
this time with orange dots and lines.
The orange represents
the Internet Research Agency,
Russia’s propaganda organization.
Specifically, the IRA created
false accounts and false messages
and successfully had their messages
retweeted by others in both communities.
Why did Russia
go to the effort to do this?
Remember:
Disinformation campaigns have a motive.
In this case, it was to get Trump elected
as a means to polarize our society
and weaken our democracy.
No matter what side
of the political spectrum you are on
or what beliefs you hold,
you should be angry
that there are those out there
who are trying to infiltrate
your communities
and manipulate your thoughts.
So why was Russia’s campaign so effective?
Why is any disinformation
campaign effective?
This is where we enter
the cognitive realm.
Disinformation is effective
because it exploits personal beliefs
to trigger psychological
and emotional responses,
such as to make you fearful or angry,
like the antifa tweet I showed earlier.
It’s effective because
it’s accomplished slowly over time,
through multiple encounters
across multiple platforms -
from Facebook to Twitter
and YouTube and back.
It’s the weaponization of information,
designed to undermine truth
and our trust in each other.
It’s a big problem,
and many people are working on it:
Tech companies and social media platforms
are working on detection technologies
to remove harmful misinformation.
Policy experts are working
on legal remedies,
mindful of our First Amendment rights.
Journalists are working
on how to tell these stories
without adding fuel to the fire.
And teachers and librarians
are retooling their approaches
to teaching information literacy.
All of these efforts are important,
and many organizations are working on it,
including our center.
But my message has been
“this is not enough,”
and we have to play a role as well.
First, we need to develop
greater situational awareness,
or information awareness if you will,
of how misinformation works.
That’s been the topic of this talk,
but I’ve only scratched the surface.
I hope people will continue
to educate themselves,
especially as new technologies
and tactics emerge, as they will.
Already we’ve witnessed Russia
deploying some new techniques,
targeting our upcoming election.
Second, we need to practice
better ways of navigating information.
The conventional approaches
that most of us grew up with,
like triangulating sources of information,
they’re not sufficient anymore,
as I hope my examples have made clear.
One approach that our center
is promoting is called “SIFT,”
developed by our partner Mike Caulfield
at Washington State University.
SIFT stands for “stop,”
“investigate” the source,
“find” better coverage,
and “trace” claims
to their original context.
These “moves,” as Mike calls them,
take 30 seconds or less to execute,
and they can make a huge difference.
Again, I’m very fond of “stop.”
And if there’s one thing
that people can do right away,
it’s to pause, take a look at the claim:
Does it pass the smell test?
In closing, misinformation
is a foundational problem.
When the World Health Organization
made one of its early
pronouncements about the COVID,
they called it simultaneously
a pandemic and an infodemic,
and they were right.
In fact,
“infodemic” could be used to describe
almost every challenge we face today.
Misinformation also tears
at our social fabric
and our relationships
with family and friends.
No one I’ve spoken with,
whether they’re left, right, or center,
is satisfied with this situation.
It worries everybody.
And this perhaps is a hopeful sign,
but only if we all play our parts.
Thank you for listening.
[whichfaceisreal.com
spotdeepfakes.org
moondisaster.org
infodemic.blog
cip.uw.edu]