TED Talk: How we can protect truth in the age of misinformation.

Preliminary commentary

What do you think the speaker means when he says: “We have to be vigilant in
defending the truth against misinformation”?

Discussion questions

1. What are other means of saying “fake news”? (Used by the speaker or that
you can remember now).

2. What is the most viral type of false news propagated?

3. Do false and true news cause different sorts of sentiments on people?

According to the research.

4. What are the roles of bots in the spread of misinformation?

5. Can be bots considered the villains as regards the spread of false

information?

6. What are the technologies that the speaker mentions which are about to
worsen this scenario? (synthetic media: fake videos, fake audios). Generative
adversarial networks with a discriminator which is capable of determining
whether something is true or false and a generator which generates synthetic
video and audio; 2o, the democratization of Artificial Intelligence to everyone,
the ability for anyone to create

7. What are the possible solutions to combat these problems being faced as
regards what is true and what is not?

Labeling:

Incentives: you can get money with this type of information

Regulation:

Transparency

8. Who gets to decide, in society, what’s true and what’s false?

9. What do you think of regulating social media in the terms put in the speech?
10. What’s your opinion on the strategy of legally punishing the ones which are
found spreading misinformation?

11. Do you agree with the “transparency paradox” issue which the speaker
raised?

12. How do we define truth and falsity? To whom we give the power to define
truth and falsity?

13. What is your opinion on the issue of ethics and technology being the
solution for these kinds of paradox involving technology? Why can’t technology
be the answer to itself?

Vocabulary in use

1. (…) the Associated Press put out the following tweet on Twitter.

2. Their purpose was to disrupt society, but they disrupted much more.

3. (…) they immediately sent the stock market crashing, wiping out 140 billion
dollars in equity value in a single day.

4. Robert Mueller, special counsel prosecutor in the United States, issued

indictments against three Russian companies…

5. All of which was fake -- misinformation designed to sow discord in the US

presidential election. 

6. We studied all of the verified true and false news stories that ever spread on
Twitter, from its inception in 2006 to 2017.

7. (…) it is well known that human attention is drawn to novelty…

8. And what we found was that across a bunch of different measures of sentiment

-- surprise, disgust, fear, sadness…

9. (…) to deploy these kinds of algorithms to generate synthetic media makes it

ultimately so much easier to create videos. 

10. The White House issued a false, doctored video of a journalist…

11. (…) And CNN had to sue to have that press pass reinstated.

12.  But if we can depress the spread of this information, perhaps it would reduce
the economic incentive.

13. How does the data combine with the algorithms to produce the outcomes that
we see?

14. Technology devised to root out and understand fake news…

15 and 16: But with the rise of fake news, the rise of fake video, the rise of fake
audio, we are teetering on the brink of the end of reality…

Vocabulary Expanded:

1. Put Out: transmit, emit, publish, issue.

2. Disrupt: break, rupture, cause confusion.

3. Equity value: Equity value constitutes the value of the company's shares and
loans that the shareholders have made available to the business. Also known
as: market capitalization.

4. Indictments: accusation.

5. Sow discord: to say and do things which cause a group as a whole to distrust
one another and begin to argue and then to fight.

6. Inception: beginning, start, onset.

7.. Drawn to: attracted to.

8.. A bunch of: a lot of, many.

9. Deploy: implement.

10. Doctored (to doctor): adulterate, falsify, forge.

11. Sue: process, prosecute.

12. Depress: devalue.

13. Outcome: result, effect, consequence.

14. Root out: exterminate, eradicate, extirpate.

15. On the brink: on the verge.

16. Teetering: swing, balance, shake.

For further discussions: artificial intelligence

NY Times article

The Right Way to Fight Fake News: Social media platforms need to make
sure their anti-misinformation strategies are empirically grounded.

1. How or what do you do to distinguish false from true news in your daily life?

2. Do you think it is easy to detect it?

3. What social medias do you make use of on a daily or weekly basis? Can you
see more fake news in a specific one?

4. Do you think that there are social medias which are more fertile terrain to the
spread of misinformation than others? Why so?

5. Do you have to deal with that in your profession? Is there anything that you
as a software engineer can do in terms of detecting or somehow stopping fake
news?

6. How do you think both the news article and the TED talk dialogue and
converge in their ideas concerning false news?

7. What strategies do you think would be the most proficuous ones do fight
misinformation spread online?

"In other words, a system of sparsely supplied warnings could be less helpful
than a system of no warnings, since the former can seem to imply that anything
without a warning is true"

Do you agree with this thought?