Fake news is one of the world greatest problem. With the rate at which fake news is spreading across the internet, this seems like an impossible plague to stop. Humans always want to know the truth, people crave for genuine contents and technology is the best solution to battle this epidemic cyber disease. Artificial intelligence could serve as a tool to fight and help slow down its spread.
Internet usage data reflect steady and unstoppable growth: every 60 seconds, 98,000 tweets shared on the Twitter, 1,500 blog posts written, 600 videos uploaded on YouTube and 160 million emails sent all over the world. No number of humans can keep up with the verification of facts for every 60 seconds, but the machine could.
This is definitely not a task that can be easily handled in no time, but the idea behind it is simple. Artificial Intelligence can be trained using machine learning to point out fake news, then store data from the websites which are trying to sell the fake news to you Every day is a different struggle with fake news, from the struggle of finding out if politicians are really telling us the news to the struggle of marketers trying to sell different kinds of product we basically don’t need.
As the growth of data increases, fake news travels way more than the actual truth. Never a time have we experienced so much information thrown to us at different angles. Luckily to our rescue, comes fact-checking companies which have a simple goal; to analyze and dissect affirmation made by celebrities and politicians. Popular brands and public figures will have to share the truth only and their statements should be backed up with facts if they still want to remain relevant. Most corporations are now keen to filter contents and provide facts for their customers. As machine learning tech rolls out, it creates raw materials for customers to be able to identify and analyze fake news, then create a solution to eliminate fake news.
Artificial intelligence and Ads
Artificial intelligence can be trained to verify the authenticity of Ads. The AdVerif.ai provides this solution by keeping an eye on where Ad contents are displayed while giving publishers also the ability to check if the content meets the policy. This company makes use of artificial intelligence tools such as Natural Language Processing and Deep learning to detect various patterns that indicate spamming, inappropriate contents or malware. It basically expands the work of an editorial personnel making it faster and smarter than its human counterpart. With these tools, it can make use of online knowledge to highlight potentially fake Ads or confirm them.
Transparency in the wine industry
Alit Wine is a company that goes further than other wine companies to promote transparency in the wine sector. They achieve this transparency by basically telling you how much it costs for each of the wine-making process involved when producing them. This company gives wine directly to its customers while giving you these details. That is some transparency that most winemaking companies won’t bother to show you.
Facebook and fake news
Recently, Facebook had a huge backlash and lost a lot of their user’s trust. They are currently on the mission to gain back that trust by working with 4 independent fact-checking companies. They are:
- CIABC News
These four organizations function as sources to confirm the truthfulness of viral stories on Facebook. The implementation of new tools to prevent the spread of fake news has already been made. When a user tries to share an unknowingly fake news, these tools notify them that the stories have been tagged as “False News’ by these fact-checkers. Although some experts believe that Al isn’t going to solve Facebook’s Fake News problem, the company is also planning on launching about two Artificial Intelligence Labs which would implement the creation of AI safety net for its users. It is also said to be a tool which would be used to tackle political propaganda, fake news and cyberbullying.
Transparency in Politics
Political propaganda can affect the public in a lot of ways. As citizens of a certain country, we are very much concerned about the transparency of the government and its truthfulness. Contratobook is an Organization which helps us achieve this goal. The company examines the work of elected public officials and the government.
Let’s say for example when a politician quote statistic on poverty saying that the rate of poverty is up, then another opposing politician comes out and also quote based on statistics that the rate of poverty is falling, both may be right. This can be as a result of absolute vs relative numbers. Automated fact-checking can handle this situation. It scans through all the documents where all these claims have been quoted before and also checks if there is evidence backing them up. This process is implemented not just to group real news and fake news, but it is created to give people the information they need to make up their mind when they need it, of course, Al won’t be the savior in completely identifying and limiting the impact of the fake news. To some extent, the technology itself is to be blamed for the spread of false information on social media platforms. Although it added positively to the impact of fake news, there is still hope that it can also be used as a weapon to fight the spread of false information too.
Brands and Companies that building trusts with their customers with facts and verified information have an edge among their competitors. Thanks to machine learning and big data, most companies are starting to create a transparent system to benefit from the Fake news is very deadly, and most organizations use it to gain financially. According to Dhruv Ghulati the CEO of FactMata, fake news is often financially driven. He went on to say that fake news correlates highly from a linguistics perspective to clickbait stories. He later provided a solution that Al should be used to penalize websites thereby hitting them where it hurts: their pockets. If they are financially affected, they would be careful about what they put out there to the general public.