Trust in everything read online has fallen post-2016 elections, but there is still minimum progress in recognising the truth from the fallacies. Aaron Sharockman, Executive Director at PolitiFact, presented during the episode the critical role technology has to play in fighting disinformation. Factchecking is a multi-stakeholder phenomenon that shouldn’t be framed as just the job of the journalist, but it should be addressed as an issue of the whole online community. This week, we are looking into ways trust can be rebuilt in the post-fake news world.
Participants:
Betty Tsakarestou, Associate Professor and Head of ADandPRLAB at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece
Nikos Panagiotou, Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Media Communications of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece & President of DCN Global
Aaron Sharockman, Executive Director at PolitiFact
Moderator: Aurra Kawanzaruwa, Manager of DCN AFRICA
Outstanding quotes:
“Here's the problem as I see it today. Today, we now know that we cannot trust everything we read on the internet. But we haven’t done a good job as a society teaching people how to figure what’s right and wrong for themselves.” - Aaron Sharockman
“How can we combine human thinking and intelligence along with technology? I think these are two spheres that should be interconnected. How can we use the technology of deep fakes, our love for stimulation, our love of fiction to hack the hackers? How can we hack this process in a reverse engineering and find completely novel paths to address disinformation? Because now we try to address it using just logic. Sometimes if you wanna hack the system, you have to play with the rules of the hacker” - Betty Tsakarestou
“I think what Facebook is building with the Metaverse is a really intriguing area, where we have to be thoughtful about how misinformation and disinformation spread. I think we can agree that social media companies got this completely wrong at the beginning, because they weren’t designing things with trust and truth in mind. They are now designing this new way of communicating and getting together and I hope that the companies have placed trust and truth in the mind. In a few years, there will be a radical disruption in what we consider traditional social media, which will have huge effects on the spread of information and that of misinformation and disinformation.” - Aaron Sharockman
DisinfoHacks Project is an innovative training program that brings together partners expertise, engaging an ecosystem of communication and media stakeholders, startup innovators and influencers in identifying, assessing, and combating disinformation." Organized by DCN Global, #ADandPRLAB, YET, funded by U.S. Department of State and U.S. Mission in Greece, supported by Found.ation and SocialInnov.