(Expansion) – It’s a battle of good guys against bad guys. The Manichean vision for explaining social phenomena is almost never convenient. But I dare to make a comparison here, since we are facing a fight between the dark side and the light side (giving us license to resort to the jargon of Star Wars, from Lucas).
On the one hand, for many years now, computer experts have been working for unclear interests in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), aimed at influencing internet users. There are many products, each day more sophisticated, that attack us with disinformation for different purposes. And there are many bad intentions of robots, which are dedicated to different missions that go from obtaining the sale of products in an unethical way, going through simulating news that sticks in our morbidity to hook us and access sites that will sow malware on our devices , until reaching campaigns to exert pressure on the electoral decision, which manipulates the democratic life of a nation.
It is evident: disinformation attacks are a constant in electoral processes such as the one we are still involved in in Mexico. What we live is illustrated in a video by the group of Supercívicos that demonstrates how a political party recruited influencers to repeat a false speech, with identical platitudes.
In truth, it is a material without waste that discovers the manufacture of these messages, later multiplied by strategists. At the same time, another influencer, named Facundo, accused that years before he was offered two million pesos for a similar cause, which he rejected as illegal, launching himself against those ridiculed in the other video.
The party in question will reach a historical personal record of seats in the Lower House, not far from fifty. This would mean that the misinformation plan, based on the falsified conviction of those characters, indeed with a lot of influence, certainly worked. However, this is just one example of what happens on a daily basis around the world and in various sectors.
But there is also the other side. In Mexico we have the saying that “for the wedge to tighten, it must be of the same suit.” Therefore, it applies to establish that in the fight against the minds that use AI to make us victims of their purposes, we must resort to the same type of technology to counteract them.
Precisely for this we now know of RIO, or the Recognition of Influence Operations. Almost five years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released this software to automatically detect disinformation narratives online. In 2017, with this tool, it was possible to identify accounts of this type, precisely prior to the national elections in France, and with an efficiency of 96%.
That MIT product doesn’t just help you recognize falsehoods. It also discovers the individuals and organizations behind this misinformation on the web; the level of impact of your campaigns, as well as the transformation and amplification of your messages, which is particularly useful, since it helps to detect them, but also to neutralize them.
Likewise, little by little other similar resources appear; for example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which aims to identify misinformation for recent notes and specific heuristics (“shortcuts” to making decisions), in order to process information and consider its accuracy.
It is important to bear in mind that, although disinformation violates the constitutional right to truthful information, there is no crime typified in the Mexican Penal Code that condemns the dissemination of the opposite, as long as it is not proven that it is an instrument to commit a crime.
Therefore, not a few have called for updating the legal framework in the face of this phenomenon and increasing rigor; But it is not easy to demonstrate a disinformative narrative, since there is a fine line between disinformation and the right to freedom of expression or opinion, also protected by the Constitution.
However, in a world where facts and opinions are constantly mixed, it is vital to develop and promote mechanisms that filter or reduce the amount of false information that circulates through social media, from the legislation and also with the support of technology.
It is not a unique issue for Mexico, so the debate is maintained from different trenches. In Spain, recently, the academic Ramón Salaverría attended the Mixed Commission of National Security and presented a set of ideas on disinformation, political polarization and the digital platforms that are doing business with it, in order to be considered to outline a legislation in this regard.
AI-based anti-disinformation tools are advancing, and it is hoped that such technology will soon be available to governments and businesses, to prevent them from the hoaxes that, I bet you, kind reader, we have all fallen for.
Editor’s Note: Javier Murillo Acuña is the founder and president of Metrics. Data scientist, expert in information technologies applied to the transformation of digital business models. He is currently working on the development of brand equity forecasting and measurement algorithms for global companies. Follow him on and / or write to him at [email protected]. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
