Forum Numerica - Paolo Rosso - In the era of disinformation: detection of fake news and conspiracy theories

Social media offer a fast and easy way for the propagation of disinformation, from fake news to conspiracy narratives. And recently even more: Mark Zuckerberg has eliminated fact-checking in Meta to "combat censorship", and Elon Musk uses uses fake news and far-right conspiracy theories to discredit political opponents and convey his own ideological battles in X [1]. Several are the attempts of foreign information manipulation interference that our countries are exposed to, and both the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) give special importance to fight and analyse the disinformation narratives of this information warfare. In this talk I will describe the attempt by malicious actors (pseudo-journalists, influencers , far-right political actors and supporters) to trigger negative emotions among the population posting fake news and conspiracy theories in X and TikTok videos on the day of the DANA flood in Valencia at the end of last October, and the days after. Moreover, I will comment further on conspiracy theories, complex narratives that attempt to explain the ultimate causes of significant events as cover plots orchestrated by secret, powerful, and malicious groups. Existing AI approaches do not distinguish between critical and conspiratorial thinking, whereas this distinction has important implications for automatic content moderation: without differentiating between critical and conspiratorial thinking, there is a high risk of pushing people toward conspiracy communities.
[1] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-elon-musks-powerful-disinformation-machine-works/

Paolo Rosso (http://personales.upv.es/prosso/) is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. His current research interests fall mainly in the area of detection of harmful information in social media, both disinformation (fake news and conspiracy theories) and hate speech (with women, immigrants, and LGBTI as targets, and when conveyed in a subtle way via irony, sacarsm or hurtful humour e.g with sexist memes and videos). Recently, he has been the PI of two projects on harmful information detection: XAI-DisInfodemics on eXplainable AI for disinformation and conspiracy detection during infodemics, and FAKEnHATE-PoC: FAKE news and HATE speech, both funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and by European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. At the moment he is the PI of the FairTransNLP Spanish project on Fairness and Transparency for equitable NLP applications in social media, and a member of the CHIST-ERA MARTINI project on Malicious Actors pRofiling and deTection In online social Network through artificial Intelligence, and the IBERIFIER-plus hub on disinformation detection in Spain and Portugal of the European Digital Media Observatory. He collaborated with the Spanish National Security Department and with the Science and Technology Office (Oficina-C) of the Spanish Congress of Deputies in topics related to disinformation campaigns and AI, and with the Spanish Observatory on racism and xenophobia (OBERAXE).