Tracking Election Misinformation

For attention all over the world, so does the spread of misinformation, false and misleading claims can travel quickly. We know that across social media. So how do you separate fact from fiction? What can be done about it? We have Neil Johnson here, head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University. Neil, thank you so much for coming. Great being with you. Your presence here is paramount. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah. So what should we be looking for? Yeah, we should be looking in the age of AI. We should be looking for Anything that looks out of the ordinary. You know, we've got now... Amazingly, all the things that were around in the just before the 2020 election are still kind of rattling around on social media. Our laboratory maps out that misinformation at scale at the level of the population. And what's circulating in the communities is the news stories and the old stories, because of course, we've got new voters and they haven't seen some of these old stories. So old stories look new to them. And then also voting machines, stories and footage circulating. We have voting machines. You know, I voted, voted three times and changed my votes. We've had a lot of those in the last couple that we're going to get a lot more of those. And of course, some of them have elements of truth. This is the hard thing of misinformation because it's not, you know, suddenly seeing. Particularly in the age of A.I., A.I. a couple of years ago, you know, somebody had 12 fingers, 15 fingers. It's not that. There are elements of truth. And so the hard thing, you know, we're all... We're all busy. We can't go and fact check everything. And so the hard thing for us when we see an element of truth is to know that the rest of the story is more suspect. And also the destruction of ballots. Some of that is even staged that we see out there. Yeah. The problem of AI, of course, of generation of videos, it's so easy to now generate a video of somebody just kind of burning a bag, you know, a supermarket bag of ballots. And how are we meant Finally here, we also mentioned AI and voice cloning. I mean, there's video and audio of Biden telling people, you know, not to vote. And that was ruled out as not the truth. How do you then sift and decipher through what's real and fake? I see it as, it's almost like a Thanksgiving dinner, you know, you sit down, you're going to hear, see, you're going to hear stories from people that you kind of know, it's the same online, you, in your communities, you're going to hear stories from people you kind of know, you sort of trust them, you sort of don't. We just have to kind of take a deep breath and think to ourselves, is, does this make sense to me? I think a lot of times people. Are told oh, you know, you need to be taught about how to deal with misinformation. I think we're all smart We just don't have time What we need to do is take all of these stories and think just sensibly if I look at all these stories Which ones are more reasonable than others? And check more than one source. Don't just go on social media and think it's the gospel. At least if you're using AI, use two or three AI to check. You have to. Well, no, thank you so much for making sure we stay focused and take our time and some breathers as we sift through this day and the rest leading up to more elections to come. We appreciate you being here. Thank you. Thank you so much.