AAAI ICWSM Tutorial

Abstract

Misinformation and disinformation on social media have a substantial cost to society all over the world. In order to tackle this bane, we must take a holistic view of the problem and learn from history. This tutorial will address the work that has been done on the problem of false information and its propagation in media. In order to take a holistic view, on the one end, we need to look at the very related problem of misinformation and disinformation in newspapers in the early 20th century and how society evolved to eradicate the most egregious of its forms and learned to live with it. On the other end, we will survey the promising technological solutions that have been designed in the last 5-10 years and a bit. The issue of digital literacy will be examined and efforts to teach our school-children how to determine the trustworthiness of information will be discussed. Solutions involving trustworthy third-parties and digital signatories will be evaluated. Time permitting, we will demonstrate these issues studying a few cases and demonstrations. We will also look at governmental policies that have been designed to curb this problem. Finally, an agenda for future work will be discussed.

Shreya Ghosh

Postdoctoral Researcher (2021-2023)

My research interests include spatio-temporal data analytics and NLP (social media data analysis, low-resource language).