Description:

Disinformation is the intentional and often coordinated distribution of false or misleading information intended to mislead, harm, or undermine a community, social group, or even a country. Disinformation is the opposite of knowledge. It undermines the mission of the free knowledge movement, the creation of a shared reality, and, indeed, democracy itself. We need an effective strategy to combat disinformation on digital platforms, including social media. We also need to ensure that governments, platforms, and intergovernmental bodies legitimately concerned about the spread of disinformation do not take misguided actions that harm human rights, particularly the right to free expression. Many platforms rely on the communities that engage with them to perform content moderation. On Wikipedia many of the rules contributors are expected to follow are not handed down by the Wikimedia Foundation through terms of service but are instead created by the community itself. While these rules and norms are numerous, they are enforced through robust moderation systems developed by the contributors to each project. Similarly, such community self-regulation occurs on other platforms, especially platforms which allow for the formation of groups based on similar interests or goals. Platforms like Reddit and Twitch have seen the development of self-governing groups that create and enforce bespoke rules based on the type of content and interactions they want. Individuals with large followings have also started to moderate comments on their own channels. Twitter’s Birdwatch is also designed to try to harness the knowledge of its user-based to correct and combat disinformation. These models have been particularly effective at combatting disinformation. On Wikipedia, for example, the community of editors came together at the start of the global pandemic to ensure that information related to the emerging virus, its impacts, and methods of treatment and prevention remained reliable and representative of the significant and supportable views on the topic. Even with these success stories, disinformation continues to proliferate. It has been a major factor in numerous elections around the world including in the Philippines, Kenya, France, and the US. Russia is actively using disinformation in attempts to conceal the true nature of its invasion of Ukraine from the Russian people. And disinformation has been shown to contribute to real world violence. This session will discuss how platforms can identify and work to fight disinformation on their services and across the internet. The panel will focus in particular on how different platforms’ models face different challenges and must rely on a wide array of responses to disinformation. It will also discuss potential policies that governments can enact to help incentivize platforms to fight disinformation without undermining human rights.