Member-only story
How AI Can Protect Us From Fake News
The psychology and science of disinformation detection
As the saying goes, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.” But in the digital age, we can actually quantify the difference. According to researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, false stories travel six times faster online than true ones.
Looking at hundreds of thousands of tweets shared by millions of people over a ten-year period, Vosoughi et al found that false stories “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.”
The top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people.
This is a big problem, because next to voter suppression laws, many political scientists see disinformation and online threats as the greatest dangers to democracy today. The ratio of genuine to fake stories is getting skewed more and more toward the latter because, as legal scholar Richard Hasen points out:
It is expensive to produce quality journalism but cheap to produce polarizing political “takes” and easily shareable disinformation.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, if there was an app that could identify fake news and hate speech so that we could eliminate them from our information diet?
Of course, any such app would have to overcome two basic objections. First, what methodology can we use to reliably identify disinformation? And second, how do we ensure our methodology is itself free from political or other biases?
Fortunately, answering the first question also resolves the second. As we’ll see, once we understand the science behind disinformation, we’ll understand why a successful fake news detection app would have to be politically neutral in operation, regardless of whether it tended to flag articles and videos that lean more to one side of the political spectrum than the other.
The “fingerprints” of disinformation
Why do lies travel so much faster and farther than the truth? According to Spanish political scientist Carlos Carrasco-Farre, the reason…
