Internet Censorship Course / Book Workshop
Disinformation is false or misleading information that is spread deliberately to deceive people. It is often spread through social media, news outlets, and other forms of communication. Disinformation can be used to manipulate public opinion, influence political decisions, and create confusion. It can also be used to discredit individuals or organizations.
In this activity, you will explore various sources of disinformation, and discuss various ways to combat it.
In this activity, you will explore several fake news sites and discuss the ways that they may be similar or different to authentic news sites.
Explore a handful of fake news sites. One possible source is from a paper that attempted to automatically characterize these sites according to infrastructure features. The dataset is here.
What are some of the common features of these sites? What are some of the differences?
What are some of the ways that these sites may be similar to authentic news sites? What are some of the ways that they may be different?
You might also consider exploring where and how these sites are hosted.
With some technical know-how, you can use the whois command to findwhere
a domain is registered. For example, whois example.com will tell you who
registered the domain example.com. You can also use the dig command to
find the IP address of a domain, as well as the authoritative name servers
for the domain.
What other infrastructure features can you think of? Could you design a machine learning-based classifer to automatically detect these sites? Be careful to think about what might distinguish a fake news site not only from a legitimate news site but also a poorly-designed or implemented website.
What could be the role of crowdsourcing in detecting disinformation? What are some of the challenges of crowdsourcing in this context?
To what extent are users themselves responsible for identifying disinformation? Are users responsible for avoiding disinformation?
What are some of the ways that disinformation can be used to manipulate public debate and influence political decisions?