The US midterm elections and the Brazilian presidential elections have shown once again how widespread misinformation content is during a democratic election process.
Some human rights groups and researchers claim that social media platforms struggled to follow through on agreements they signed with Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) in February 2022, in which they promised to combat materials that could undermine such a democratic process.
“On Election Day, and as vote counting was underway in the days that followed, posts and videos containing misinformation and allegations of voter fraud began circulating on social media. But when it comes to voter fraud, platforms have very different policies, and even the strongest ones are not always enforced. Technology platforms have a history of bending their rules for powerful actors and even removing politicians’ speeches when they violate their policies,” said Deborah Brown, senior digital rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, and Maria Laura Canineu.
Social Media Platforms Have Failed
Meta has claimed to have taken steps to remove misinformation on Facebook. However, this claim has come under scrutiny and Global Witness, an international NGO, has investigated Facebook's work.
Speaking about Global Witness’s findings during DTX London on October 13, 2022, Carole Cadwalladr, a Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist, said: “[Global Witness] created several accounts and created five types of ads that contained false information about the Brazilian elections and five others that delegitimized many aspects of the elections themselves. They were not located in Brazil, they did not use a VPN, and every single ad they created deliberately violated all of Meta’s policies. All of the ads were accepted by Meta and allowed to run on Facebook.”
After Cadwalladr broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook introduced the Ad Library, which she said “provides a measure of transparency, but it is woefully inadequate. Even today, our elections are not secure. Facebook and other social media platforms have failed and are a threat surface that bad actors can exploit as they please.”
Several organizations have developed different approaches, methods, and frameworks to address the problem of disinformation. These proposals leverage emerging technologies (including AI, data analytics, and blockchain) to deliver a more trustworthy internet. Infosecurity investigates three of the most prominent approaches.
The Civil Society Path: Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the CASM Beam
On November 14, 2022, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and startup CASM Technology officially launched Beam, a multilingual, multi-platform toolkit dedicated to tracking, exposing, and countering disinformation and other forms of manipulation and deception online.
According to its London-based developers, Beam consists of two technical layers – described at length in a white paper authored by Dr Francesca Arcostanzo and Melanie Smith, from ISD, and Carl Miller, research director at Demos and co-founder of CASM Technology.
Beam's foundational layer is a machine learning and data analytics tool developed over the past ten years by CASM, called Method52. This tool consists of about 100 components, responsible for a variety of tasks, from collecting data from Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, YouTube, PeerTube, 4Chan, Discord, Mastodon, mainstream media news sources, and a large number of independent websites to analyzing text using natural language processing (NLP).
The core Beam layer consists of six Beam programs. Five of them are used to analyze the data collected and curated by Method52 (Beam Collect, Beam Messages, Beam Hate Speech, Beam Accounts, Beam Network and Communities) and one, Beam Window, produces Beam output, including dashboards, data visualizations, regular reporting, and alerts, which are used to power responses to information threats.
When ISD and CASM began work on a tool to combat disinformation in 2015, they wanted to develop a platform that would be transparent and independent of any online service provider, work across as many different data sources, issues and languages as possible – including sub-languages served – and adapt to new technologies and new methods of online manipulation.
Development of the Beam architecture began in 2018. In 2021, they were among the three winners of the US-Paris Tech Challenge, a competition on innovative responses to disinformation. They used the $83,000 funding award to complete development of the Beam toolkit.
While Beam's core team includes subject matter experts, data journalists, open source intelligence practitioners, and Beam architects and developers, they also wanted Beam to be used by civil society organizations and power responses beyond platform takedowns or journalistic reports.
Other actors have also created similar platforms to provide a more secure digital communication space.
(Full article in English published by infosecurity-magazine.com)