Access to accurate information, has never been more important. Our health and lives depend on it.
Earlier this week, Twitter announced a new pilot project called Birdwatch that will aim to stop the spread of misinformation through community engagement. I’m interested in hearing your views on whether measures like this could be effective, and how you see this playing out.
Fake news, as a broad term for disinformation, misinformation and mal-information, has become one of the most significant societal trends of our time. History shows us that information has always been manipulated to drive specific agendas, most often political. The difference today is the scale and rate at which this is happening. The availability, ease of use and reach of today’s technology platforms have made it possible for disinformation and misinformation to spread rapidly online, affecting our beliefs and behaviours in various ways. How does the immediate availability of information, where anyone can become a publisher, impact the role of journalism in society? And what is the role and responsibility of technology and social media platforms in ensuring that their platforms are not used to spread misinformation? Do interventions from social media platforms to curb the spread of misinformation equal censorship of free speech?
These are all difficult questions facing us, especially in the midst of a raging, global pandemic where the need for accurate, factual information is so critical. COVID-19 has shown us that it’s our behaviour in adhering to social distancing, hygiene measures and mask-wearing, that can have the biggest impact in affecting the infection curve. And as our country gets ready to protect our healthcare workers with the first phase of the vaccine rollout in the next few weeks, accurate information about the safety and efficacy of vaccines will be paramount if we are to succeed as a country. For us as Discovery, our priority is to protect the health of our employees and our clients, and we will certainly do our part in the coming months to ensure factual and correct information is available on the topic of COVID-19 and vaccines. Access to accurate information, has never been more important. Our health and lives depend on it.
Two great tools that you can use to check the facts are: https://toolbox.google.com/factcheck/explorer and https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/
Founder of an award-winning AI startup proactively identifying and assisting financially fragile customers to avoid payment defaults.
4 年So basically Twitter is very cleverly crowdsourcing (at no cost to them) to fix a proeblem they should be responsible for. They should be paying professionals and developing new AI tools to root out misinformation more efficiently and effectively.
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4 年This is one of the most difficult question in modern age, no easy way to solve this, one of the reasons social media is successful is that it replicates our society on a digital platform, the rate at which news spread creates a bigger problem, however if our society remains the same where you have communities who take things as they are and not try to verify or ask questions, the challenge remains, i would even go as far as saying from schools to everything we do, we must be a society that asks questions which seems to have been lost. Interventions like twitter will help as long as we get to the root cause