In recent years we have seen “fake news” spread like wildfire through virtually all means of communication across the globe. Factual accurate information is cohabitating with an ever increasing flood of deceptive statements and outright false claims that have the potential, at the very least, of confusing the average information consumer or, at the very worst, manipulating them for specific agendas.
A study conducted by MIT Sloan in 2018 proved that false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.
Artificial Intelligence can helps combat both disinformation (deliberate) and misinformation (erroneous) by sifting through billions of communications and being able to determine how accurate and trustworthy a source is, for example, and rapidly locating, classifying and flagging content that can pose a risk to society or people’s wellbeing so that it can be prioritized for human revision, assessment and removal if needed.
