Combating Fake News, Misinformation, and Machine Learning Generated Fakes: Insight's from the Islamic Ethical Tradition

Abstract

The growing trend of sharing and acquiring news through social media platforms and the World Wide Web has impacted individuals as well as societies, spreading misinformation and disinformation. This trend—along with rapid developments in the field of machine learning, particularly with the emergence of techniques such as deep learning that can be used to generate data—has grave political, social, ethical, security, and privacy implications for society. This paper discusses the technologies that have led to the rise of problems such as fake news articles, filter bubbles, social media bots, and deep-fake videos, and their implications, while providing insights from the Islamic ethical tradition that can aid in mitigating them. We view these technologies and artifacts through the Islamic lens, concluding that they violate the commandment of spreading truth and countering falsehood. We present a set of guidelines, with reference to Qur‘anic and Prophetic teachings and the practices of the early Muslim scholars, on countering deception, putting forward ideas on developing these technologies while keeping Islamic ethics in perspective.

How to Deal with the Fabricated Hadith: Some Notes for Hadith Dispersion in Social Media

“…In light of this, the relationship between the narrators is critical in assessing the hadith's rank. The investigation established that fraudulent narrators originate and distribute every bogus hadith (Sookhdeo, 2006;Zubair, Raquib, & Qadir, 2019). Thus, religious scholars can contribute to and play a role in combating the spread of falsified hadiths.…”

Fake News Detection Model on Social Media by Leveraging Sentiment Analysis of News Content and Emotion Analysis of Users’ Comments

“…Some fake news is unintentionally published or shared and is called misinformation [ 43 ]. Repeated viewing of fake news makes it familiar to the recipient, makes it believable, and causes it to be circulated as real news [ 44 ]. However, it becomes difficult to distinguish between fake news and real news, as scientific research has revealed that the human ability to distinguish between true and false information is relatively weak, with a rate of about 54% [ 45 ].…”

Combating Fake News: Stakeholder Interventions and Potential Solutions

“…Nevertheless, most of the authors did not highlight the need to provide security and privacy to the user's confidential information. For example, Zubair et al [10] explored about combating the fake news according to the islamic ethical tradition. The review has analyzed the Islamic guidelines to detect fake news (misinformation) and machine learning generated fakes.…”