India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni, delivered a strong statement against Pakistan here during a UN Security Council meeting on the ‘Situation in Afghanistan’. File photo: X/@IndiaatUnitedNations via PTI

India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni, delivered a strong statement against Pakistan here during a UN Security Council meeting on the ‘Situation in Afghanistan’. File photo: X/@IndiaatUnitedNations via PTI

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Greensboro Coliseum on October 22, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
| Photo Credit: AP

In today’s post-truth world, where deception and disinformation threaten democracy, history’s lessons are more relevant than ever. As we look to the future, let us revisit the past and applaud the Haitians’ momentous contribution to fighting colonialism. After the Revolution of 1791, Haiti became the first free Black-led republic. However, it is among the poorest nations today, due in large part to France and the U.S. Haiti paid France a colossal debt for 122 years to secure its independence. The U.S. worked to isolate the independent country by cutting off aid and putting an embargo on trade in the early 19th century. In 1915, the U.S. occupied Haiti. It left in 1934, but continued to control Haiti’s public finances until 1947. Such suppression is a measured result of global antagonism to Black liberation.

This historical context underscores the misery and the experiences of marginalised communities in the U.S. In the 1970s, when HIV/AIDS affected the U.S., particularly the gay community, a damaging narrative began to grow that the epidemic had originated in Haiti. Thus, the Haitians were seen as high risk. This fuelled fear and xenophobia. Schoolchildren, influenced by adult conversations, spurned Haitian peers. Their ignorance masked a darker reality: systemic misinformation and bigotry. For years, Haitians faced taunts about extreme poverty and mud cake consumption, perpetuating emasculating essentialisms, racism and fear.

False narratives

Haiti has been the main target of former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s derision. In 2018, for instance, he referred to Haiti and several African nations as “s*ithole countries” and questioned the need for more Haitian immigrants. In 2024, Mr. Trump and J.D. Vance, his running mate, have together peddled rumours about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, stoking fear. Mr. Vance’s false claims of pet abductions and consumption are particularly odious, targeting legal Haitian immigrants. Mr. Trump too resorted to abominable stereotypes, declaring, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” This infamous statement has now been immortalised in music history, transmuted into a stinging rebuke of political chicanery that exposes the dark tactics of political manipulation.

In the U.S., every five years, a wave of unfounded, racially charged, and xenophobic accusations resurface, aiming to marginalise and stigmatise the Haitian population. They undermine any progress made towards social cohesion. It is crucial to be aware of the threat Mr. Trump’s leadership poses: his outrageous comments on migrants have damaged the nation’s moral fabric; yet people believe the implausible, or at least lend credence to it.

Disturbing trend

The false claims of these two leaders have gained traction, despite being baseless and harmful. Their lies have propelled their ratings. This is a disturbing trend where politicians not only lie and wrap themselves in outrageous conspiracy theories but also get praised for it. Repeat the outlandish lie many times till it becomes a part of the vernacular and people begin to fall prey to the discursive strategies of the extreme right.

The danger of Mr. Trump’s leadership lies in his willingness to exploit and manipulate information to achieve his goals. His claims of election fraud and attempts to undermine the democratic process reflect on the type of presidency the U.S. will have if he is elected. His threat of denying representation and federal resources to millions of marginalised people through the abuse of executive power could become a reality.

Fighting back

Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union are already up in arms. Fortunately, movements emerge to reassert equality, justice, and freedom. The American Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and other struggles demonstrate how institutions can be transformed to uphold democratic values. The resilience behind such movements inspires hope, reminding us that history is not just a record of the past but a guiding light for shaping our collective future. Fostering inclusive policies and amplifying marginalised voices becomes vital in upholding human values. Speaking truth to power remains the ever-abiding credo of the minorities to fortify the fight for upholding democratic institutions and strive for a more just and equitable society in a land of their choice. This would be possible only through the promotion of critical thinking, media literacy, and informed citizenship.

As we move forward, it is fundamental to reject such hate-filled tactics and promote inclusivity, respect, and truth. The democratic institutions that a nation inherits from its founding fathers serve as a lasting scaffolding of human values, but it is vital that we preserve and reinforce them.

Meanwhile, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield seek a better life, driven by a desire to enjoy the fundamental rights of legally settled citizens. Their story is one of resilience and hope, not sedition or machinations. However, they face an excruciating history of discriminatory policies. Public institutions are failing and chipping away at the fundamental principles of democracy. The world remains a witness to the spread of undemocratic ideologies, fuelled by narratives that distort reality and manipulate public opinion.

Shelley Walia taught Cultural Theory at Panjab University, Chandigarh

Researchers have now found that artificial intelligence can alter conspiracy beliefs, challenging the long-held idea that those who embrace these ideas are very unlikely to change. A number of conspiracy theories include the assertion that moon landings were fabricated, and another reports that microchips have been placed in the Covid-19 vaccines. Such beliefs sometimes have a devastating consequence.

The study, headed by associate professor of American University Dr Thomas Costello, revealed that AI indeed effectively promotes critical thinking and disproves fact-based counterarguments. They conducted experiments involving 2,190 people who already subscribed to conspiracy theories using an AI system called “DebunkBot.”.

Participants shared their conspiracy theory and evidence supporting it with the AI and then engaged in a three-round conversation. Afterward, they rated the truth of their beliefs on a 100-point scale. Those who discussed their conspiracy theory with the AI showed a 20% drop in belief, while the change was minimal for those discussing non-conspiracy topics.

“About one in four people who began the experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that belief,” said Dr Costello.

“In most cases, the AI can only chip away-making people a bit more sceptical and uncertain-but a select few were disabused of their conspiracy entirely.”

Effects lasted at least two months and applied to almost all types of conspiracy theories, except for those based on factual information. One in four participants who initially believed in a conspiracy theory completely abandoned it by the end of the experiment.

This would suggest that AI may play a pivotal role in warding off the scourge of misinformation, especially on social media. However, Professor Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge and others posed questions over whether people would eagerly participate with AI in real-life situations and, quite frankly, how they really managed to win over participants with their methods, including empathy and affirmation. At any rate, this study has worthwhile lessons to impart upon us about the capacity of AI when it comes to countering conspiracy theories.

Sydney:

For more than a decade, researchers and journalists have relied on a digital tool called CrowdTangle to track and fight the spread of viral falsehoods online.

But earlier this week, the owner of CrowdTangle, Meta, shut the tool down. The tech giant has replaced it with its new Content Library, which it says will serve the same purpose and be “more user friendly”.

As long-time users of CrowdTangle to track and analyse online misinformation campaigns, we are sceptical of this claim. We are also very concerned by the fact CrowdTangle’s closure comes at a time when misinformation on social media is rife – and is bound to worsen in the lead up to the November presidential election in the United States.

So, why did Meta decide to close CrowdTangle now? And how will this affect the fight against the spread of misinformation and disinformation online?

CrowdTangle: a tried and trusted tool

Founded in 2011, CrowdTangle quickly gained popularity among media outlets which used it to track and analyse trending topics and articles on social media platforms for commercial purposes. Facebook (as Meta was then called) purchased the company five years later.

There were several reasons why CrowdTangle was a powerful tool for researchers like us who study the spread of misinformation and disinformation online. Firstly, we could download large datasets to use for computational modelling and other forms of analysis. The data was also easily searchable using keywords.

We could also use CrowdTangle to automatically analyse trends in large collections of data from multiple sources.

These features helped us analyse the influence of far-right accounts on Facebook during the COVID pandemic. They also helped us analyse the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Meta’s content moderation policies in curbing the spread of vaccine misinformation.

But CrowdTangle was not a vital tool only for researchers like us.

Journalists at the New York Times used it to expose the influence of far-right accounts in the US. Their peers at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation also used it to monitor QAnon’s growing influence during the pandemic, and to track disinformation fuelling the recent race riots in the United Kingdom.

Why is Meta closing CrowdTangle?

Given researchers and journalists used CrowdTangle to expose some of Meta’s failings to the world, it’s somewhat unsurprising the company would question why it was funding this largely free service. Keeping it operational, logic would dictate, would be bad for business.

But the reasons behind the closure of CrowdTangle are also more complicated.

One of the co-founders of the company, Brandon Silverman, told Wired the closure was likely part of Meta’s broader withdrawal from the news business.

This withdrawal started in 2016 when the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed news was bad for Meta’s core business: selling ads.

While news might generate strong engagement on Meta’s platforms, it is the wrong kind of engagement for advertisers. X (formerly Twitter) also recently discovered this, when technology giant IBM pulled its advertising from the platform after its ads were placed next to posts by Nazis.

Meta’s policies aimed at reducing exposure to news content across its platforms make explicit its withdrawal from the news business.

In February, the company announced it would stop “proactively recommending political content from accounts you don’t follow” on Instagram. It also started de-ranking political content on Facebook.

These announcements followed Meta’s decision to pull out of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and stop paying for news content.

However, while this redirection away from news may be commercially motivated, it is also about the particular news and information that spreads on Meta’s products (for example, far-right influencers outperforming legacy news).

This brings Meta into the cross-hairs of international regulators and threatens its ability to operate in key markets.

An inferior new tool

Meta has replaced CrowdTangle with its Content Library, which it claims will “provide researchers access to more publicly-available content across Facebook and Instagram”. The new tool will allow access to comments and short-form video, which CrowdTangle did not.

But the new tool has major limitations.

Earlier this month the Coalition for Independent Technology Research published results of a survey with 400 independent researchers and 50 research organisations. They indicated Meta’s Content Library has reduced functionality, including an inability to export data and use external tools to analyse it. It also has reduced access to posts from public figures without a large number of followers.

Combined, these factors will greatly hinder research.

But the biggest issue with Meta’s new Content Library is that it won’t be freely available to journalists and newsrooms.

The exact reasons for this are unclear. What is clear, however, are the implications of this reduced access.

Mozilla, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to making the internet free and open for all, said in an open letter to Meta:

Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record. This means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced.

There have been countless research reports, news articles, inquiries and lawsuits regarding misuse of Meta’s platforms.

Yet it seems the only lesson the company has learned is to be selective about which data it makes transparent – and to whom.

(Authors:Amelia Johns, Associate Professor, Digital and Social Media, School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney; Francesco Bailo, Lecturer in Data Analytics in the Social Sciences, University of Sydney, and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Associate Professor in Behavioral Data Science, University of Technology Sydney)

(Disclosure Statement: Amelia Johns receives funding from the Australia Research Council and the Defence Innovation Network. She has previously received funding from Meta’s content policy award. Francesco Bailo receives funds from the Defence Innovation Network and has previously received a research grant from Facebook (now Meta). Marian-Andrei Rizoiu receives funding from the Australian Department of Home Affairs, the Defence Science and Technology Group, the Defence Innovation Network and the Australian Academy of Science)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.

The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to.

For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year — a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.

“In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms,” Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP.

“It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency.”

Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.

It’s a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.

“It’s an entire new muscle” that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman told AFP, calling for “openness and transparency.”

‘Direct threat’

In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.

By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.

In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them “quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression.”

The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.

Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.

“Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle’s core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency,” said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.

The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a “direct threat” to the integrity of elections, it added.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter’s claims are “just wrong,” insisting the Content Library will contain “more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle” and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.

‘Lot of concerns’

Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.

Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.

Meta’s decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.

CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped “hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies,” Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told AFP.

Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, will have access to the Content Library.

But other researchers and nonprofits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives. Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.

“While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it’s not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle’s functionality — will,” Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita, told AFP.

“It has generated a lot of concerns.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The European Commission has issued a set aft of guidelines for digital giants to tackle risks to elections including disinformation. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

The EU called on Facebook, TikTok and other tech titans on March 26 to crack down on deepfakes and other AI-generated content by using clear labels ahead of Europe-wide polls in June.

The recommendation is part of a raft of guidelines published under a landmark content law by the European Commission for digital giants to tackle risks to elections including disinformation. The EU executive body has unleashed a string of measures to clamp down on big tech, especially regarding content moderation.

Its biggest tool is the Digital Services Act (DSA) under which the bloc has designated 22 digital platforms as “very large” including Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and X.

There has been feverish excitement over artificial intelligence since OpenAI’s ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, but the EU’s concerns over the technology’s harms have grown in parallel.

Brussels especially fears the impact of Russian “manipulation” and “disinformation” on elections taking place in the bloc’s 27 member states on June 6-9.

In the new guidelines, the Commission said the largest platforms “should assess and mitigate specific risks linked to AI, for example by clearly labelling content generated by AI (such as deepfakes)”.

It recommended that big platforms promote official information on elections and “reduce the monetisation and virality of content that threatens the integrity of electoral processes” to diminish any risks.

“With today’s guidelines we are making full use of all the tools offered by the DSA to ensure platforms comply with their obligations and are not misused to manipulate our elections, while safeguarding freedom of expression,” said the EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton.

While the guidelines are not legally binding, platforms must explain what other “equally effective” measures they are taking to limit the risks if they do not adhere to them.

The EU can ask for more information and if regulators do not believe there is full compliance, they can hit the firms with probes that could lead to hefty fines.

‘Trusted’ information

Under the new guidelines, the Commission also said political advertising “should be clearly labelled as such” before a tougher law on the issue comes into force in 2025. It also urges platforms to have mechanisms “to reduce the impact of incidents that could have a significant effect on the election outcome or turnout”. The EU will conduct “stress-tests” with relevant platforms in late April, it said.

X has already been under investigation since December over content moderation.

It pressed Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and four other platforms to provide more information on how they are countering AI risks to polls on March 14.

In the past few weeks, several of the companies including Meta have outlined their plans.

TikTok has announced more of the measures it was taking including push notifications from April that will direct users to find more “trusted and authoritative” information about the June vote.

TikTok has around 142 million monthly active users in the EU — and is increasingly used as a source of political information among young people.