Our two most powerful weapons in the disinformation age are AI and education

The spread of false information on the internet is blamed by many experts for making the Covid-19 pandemic worse. AFP

Few would dispute that fake news has a negative impact on society. It has been blamed for election upsets, needless deaths from Covid-19 vaccine opposition and, perhaps most worryingly, an environment in which people around the world have such wildly differing interpretations of reality that many could be forgiven for thinking their neighbours inhabit a parallel universe.

But while the problem continues to grow, and the actors behind fake stories become increasingly brazen and cunning, it is important to understand that the war against fake news can be won, and a combination of new and traditional approaches – including artificial intelligence and education – will be key to victory.

The need to tackle fake news cannot be understated. Perhaps the most familiar example of fake news in the US involves the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, with misleading content around the 2020 election contributing to around 45 per cent of US voters failing to believe that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner, according to a poll by Axios.

On other occasions, fake news can lead directly to an increase in serious illness and loss of life, as was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, when fake and misleading information reached such a frenzy that the World Health Organisation deemed the phenomenon an “infodemic” and pledged to provide accurate information to fight the din of misleading content. Of course, similar scenarios have been observed before, albeit at a smaller scale, prior to Covid-19. For example, in 2019, Unicef highlighted the link between fake news, anti-vaxxers and an ensuing spike in cases of childhood measles around the world.

Fake news can lead directly to an increase in serious illness and loss of life

So, how can society tackle this problem? While fact-checking content can be effective, it is also labour-intensive and lacks the speed to prevent the initial wave of the spread of any given fake story. And the spread can be rapid: 50 per cent of the spread of fake news on Twitter in many cases happens in less than 10 minutes, and – not wanting to pick on any one platform – research has shown that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth on Twitter.

The rapid spread of fake news, and its unfortunate tendency to spread faster than truthful content, makes it crucial for organisations including media platforms and regulators to take a more analytical and automated approach to tackling the issue.

And this is exactly where AI comes in. AI can help fact-checkers verify and detect fake news, and is likely to play a growing role in assisting human fact-checkers. In particular, AI systems can be taught to detect fake news based on the type of language and sentence structure used, whether content emanates from a website known to be a common source of fake news, and by detecting who is spreading it on social media. In this way, AI-based systems can move rapidly enough to detect potentially fake news and to alert human fact-checkers before the content goes viral. Moreover, by learning to find the most common sources of fake news rapidly, AI will technically be able to halt it at the source by flagging domains that should be blocked or flagged as originators of fake and malign content.

This is not to say that AI will replace human fact-checking, rather it could play a major complementary role. AI has the ability to help humans with the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of fact-checking: to know the most important claims to check, to know when somebody says something that has already been fact-checked and to check claims as quickly as possible.

However, while AI’s role will be vital in the fight against fake news, authorities should not overlook the importance of humans. Education about fake news and malicious content should be a key pillar of governments’ strategies to tackle fake news, and the effectiveness of this approach is amply demonstrated by Finland, whose government launched an anti-fake news education initiative in 2014. The country now ranks first out of 35 countries in a study measuring resilience to the post-truth phenomenon, according to the European Policies Initiative at the Open Society Institute.

While I would certainly not want to draw a correlation between Finland being ranked top in the World Happiness Report in 2022 and the country’s success tackling fake news, it seems plausible to suggest that a society that has a shared truth – albeit with healthy and nuanced debate – will be more cohesive and happier.

What I can say with greater certainly is that Finland is an important reminder that the war on fake news can be won. Education and technology including AI are key pillars to halt the spread of fake news and its toxic effects. Nations around the world can learn from this approach.