Disinformation has been used in warfare and military strategy over time. But it is undeniably being intensified by the use of smart technologies and social media. This is because these communication technologies provide a relatively low-cost, low-barrier way to disseminate information basically anywhere.
The million-dollar question then is: Can this technologically produced problem of scale and reach also be solved using technology?
Indeed, the continuous development of new technological solutions, such as artificial intelligence (AI), may provide part of the solution.
Technology companies and social media enterprises are working on the automatic detection of fake news through natural language processing, machine learning and network analysis. The idea is that an algorithm will identify information as “fake news,” and rank it lower to decrease the probability of users encountering it.