Fighting Misinformation in the Open
In late February, over a hundred journalists, technologists, and educators gathered at the MIT Media Lab for MisInfoCon, a quickly — but expertly — produced event designed to identify and hack on creative solutions to the challenges of misinformation in the internet age.
Mozilla’s interest in solving this problem is outlined in the “web literacy” section of the Internet Health Report. We define web literacy as the set of skills needed to read, write, and participate on the web. Our thinking is that being a citizen of the web requires a deeper level of understanding than, say, being a driver of a car. Most drivers don’t need to deeply understand how a car works to effectively and safely drive one. On the other hand, an internet citizen who doesn’t understand how news and information is sourced, verified, and spread throughout the web, can unintentionally become a dangerous purveyor of misinformation.
Misinformation is much older that the web, but the speed at which information now travels, combined with the democratization of news-gathering makes this a much different problem than any time in history. As stated in the Internet Health Report, low levels of web literacy is a hidden crisis of the digital era.
Attendees of the MisInfoCon event tackled this problem from multiple angles. More than 20 projects were demo’ed at the end of the weekend, many of which were conceived during the weekend by groups of people who’d not met previously. Projects covered a range of solutions including the technological (e.g. algorithms and standards), the journalistic (e.g. detecting patterns in news coverage, checklists for newsrooms), the psychological (an “empathy accelerator”), and the educational (e.g. media literacy apps and curricula).
I came into the weekend knowing that the term “fake news” wasn’t a descriptive enough term to be useful, but without a more nuanced lexicon to draw from. One of the most useful takeaways from the event was a framework presented by Claire Wardle of First Draft News, which provides just such a vocabulary. This framework can be elaborated and expanded upon, allowing us to focus our solutions on the particulars of the different types of misinformation.
I spent much of the weekend working with a team from Hive Austin, whose tech-enabled, open source media literacy curriculum has been funded by the Mozilla Foundation. Michael Kanin, publisher of the Austin Monitor and a member of the core team working on the project, explains the educational focus: “We want to go to war against misinformation via strategies aimed at future media consumers.“
I suspect Mozilla will approach this issue from multiple directions, too. I’m very excited about the Hive Austin project, which will be piloted later this year in the Austin Independent School District. A great advantage of Mozilla’s network model is that we can pilot projects locally, and then help to spread working models to other communities, amplifying their impact.
I’m also intrigued by the possibility of letting our advocacy team run with this topic. It’s not that the topic itself is suffering from low awareness levels, but I imagine the team’s creative minds can come up with some engaging ways to broadcast the various cross-discipline solutions being developed.
Perhaps Mozilla’s biggest contribution will be doing what we do best — advocating that these solutions be developed in the open, allowing diverse communities of contributors to add to the collective knowledge. I believe the problem of misinformation is one of the greatest threats to the health of the internet, but I also believe the open practices enabled by the internet provide our best chance at fighting it.
