Towards a New Science of Disinformation

Abstract

How can we best address the dangerous impact that deep learninggenerated fake audios, photographs, and videos (a.k.a. deepfakes) may have in personal and societal life? We foresee that the availability of cheap deepfake technology will create a second wave of disinformation where people will receive specific, personalized disinformation through different channels, making the current approaches to fight disinformation obsolete. We argue that fake media has to be seen as an upcoming cybersecurity problem, and we have to shift from combating its spread to a prevention and cure framework where users have available ways to verify, challenge, and argue against the veracity of each piece of media they are exposed to. To create the technologies behind this framework, we propose that a new Science of Disinformation is needed, one which creates a theoretical framework both for the processes of communication and consumption of false content. Key scientific and technological challenges facing this research agenda are listed and discussed in the light of state-of-art technologies for fake media generation and detection, argument finding and construction, and how to effectively engage users in the prevention and cure processes.

Design Lessons from Building Deep Learning Disinformation Generation and Detection Solutions

“…The results show the importance of understanding the context, having a clear methodological approach, and being able to explain both the modelling reasoning and the results obtained. Additionally, Pinhanez et al (2022) argue that disinformation, and particularly, fake news and deep fakes, are an important upcoming cyber security problem that could be tackled building a new way of understanding disinformation by merging generation and detection perspectives while actively engaging users in prevention and treatment processes. On this, Rogers & Niederer (2020) analyze political dimensions of politically deployed social media manipulation and identifies two major waves when dealing with this.…”