Algorithms & Society series

The internet in general and social Media in particular have relativized, through their global, complex and instantaneous information flows, assumptions about truth and authority in fact-based content. This has created new opportunities for state actors to use information beyond traditional conceptions of propaganda to directly assault a public’s conception of reality. Additionally, almost anyone has the capability to challenge evidential claims through narratives and imagery alone as there is a wide appetite online for alternative realities. This requires new approaches to media literacy in education, the creative arts and in our acts of media consumption and dissemination.

Chapter 1 — “#dominant voices in the new Disinformation order” by Sara Monaci– discusses how disinformation has been used to affect public opinion. The recent pandemic crisis has seen government leaders and everyday people taking on the role of social media influencers and propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories. The chapter finds empirical evidence from a Twitter case study in the Italian context that opinion leaders and dominating voices disseminate online deception. In the spread of disinformation, leaders’ social networks operate as catalysts and amplifiers. This suggests a strategy to redirect the audience from a prominent platform to “below the radar” channels with more radical ideas.

Chapter 2 — “Curse or Cure? The Role of Algorithm in Promoting or Countering Information Disorder” by Taeyoung Lee and Chenyan Jia — analyzes how online deception, misinformation, and mal-information have caused information disorder. While these are not necessarily novel phenomena, the digitally connected world has offered unparalleled challenges in the scale and complexity of mitigating the social impacts. Algorithms are ambivalent as they can originate, distribute, and amplify information disorder, but they can also identify and aid content moderation. While new algorithmic techniques are needed to address the problem, so also are new ways to help people become less susceptible to disinformation in their media sources.

Chapter 3 — “For the sake of sharing: Fake News as memes’’ by Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, Cande Sánchez-Olmos, Tatiana Hidalgo-Marí — examines how much fake news mimics memes in its appearance and appeal. The lighthearted and consensual qualities of memes are compatible with fake news’ partisan, ideologically skewed, and misleading qualities. Fake news, like memes, goes viral, mutates, and adapts to different situations. Fakes news adopts and adapts the communication strategies of memes to ensure its wider dissemination.

Chapter 4 — “AIBO — An Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Intelligence Brainwave Opera — Or I Built A “Sicko” AI, And So Can You” by Ellen Pearlman– presents a new media artwork, AIBO (Artificial Intelligent Brainwave Opera), that used GPT-2 to generate a “sicko” AI model. AIBO was a cloud-based character that interacted with a human performer wearing a brain computer interface. To create the ‘sicko AI,’ forty-seven copyright-free works about monsters, human dysfunction, power, and dominance from the late 1800s through the 1940s were used to seed the character. The work shows how easy it is to create a non-human AI that expresses unethical norms.

Acknowledgment

The chapter summaries here have in places drawn from the authors’ chapter abstracts, the full versions of which can be found in Routledge’s online reference for the volume.