My last meeting in Ireland – and indeed in Europe – was with Linette Lim, a PhD candidate at the Connected_Politics lab in my alma mater of UCD. Previously a journalist, her area of interest is media and propaganda in authoritarian regimes and in smaller liberal democracies close to those regimes.
Dublin being a small town, we met for a coffee one afternoon and literally two days later she was sat two rows behind me on my flight to London! It was a delight to meet Linette and my head is still spinning from her research and also some of the other concepts she introduced me to.
I am going to try and explain this in really plain English, so any inaccuracies are mine and not Linette’s!
Exposing real people to misinformation is a tricky ethical issue as one can argue that exposing them causes harm. But some research by Park et al. (2024) found that AI agents created with generative AI are about 85% accurate in replicating the original participants’ responses – without the harm.
So Linette and her colleagues conducted some research where they created over 1,100 LLM agents to simulate Taiwanese people with a pro-China belief system. They then surveyed them to see how likely they were to believe, and also share, two news articles: one about an internal topic (related to COVID vaccinations in Taiwan) and another about an external topic (about the US military in the region).
The agents were likely to believe, and also likely to share, each article.
The research then gave the agents one more piece of debunking information: “This statement has been verified by independent fact-checkers and proven to be false news.” Then they asked the agents again how likely they were to believe, and share the article.
For both the internally-focused and the externally-focused news articles, the agents were less likely to believe them and also less likely to share further.
Now, as always, there are limitations to this research that the paper covers in detail, but the paper concludes that “fact-checking interventions have a measurable effect in reducing the credibility of misinformation”.
Linette also referred to some other research by the Taiwan Fact-Check Centre that found people were more likely to accept fact-checking of misinformation when it was related to their own side of politics.
All of this feeds into the argument that fact-checking, while never a silver bullet, will have some positive impact on the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Audrey Tang and Plurality
Linette also pointed me towards Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former Minister for Digital Affairs, who created an AI video of herself and shred it publicly with an explanatory video on how it was done, in a powerful pre-bunking exercise. Below is a short (< 1 minute) video via X/Twitter by Audrey themselves, on Christine Amanpour’s PBS show.
Audrey Tang is the co-author of the open-source book Plurality, available to download free at https://www.plurality.net/ (or you can buy a nice printed copy via Amazon). In this book, the authors discuss collaborative technology as it relates to democracy. I’ve not read it yet so there may be another blog post in that later! Tang’s body of work is really fascinating and is a rabbit hole I am likely to find myself in.
Tang is passionate about moving away from the concept of simple media literacy to media competency, where people are taught not only to receive information and process it in a way that helps them better understand what is fabricated and what it not, but they can “co-create and contribute” in a way that improves the information ecosystem by their participation. And by being exposed to more and more fake news and deepfakes, whilst having the ability to question and contribute, people become “inoculated” against disinformation and it loses its power. Tang calls it societal resilience.
This whole discussion gave me a lot of hope for the future. It signified to me that humans have the capacity and ability to fight against the flood of disinformation and that we can become more resilience and able to withstand those who aim to manipulate us.
Over and over again, my conversations with these remarkable people I’ve met have brought me back to the famous quote by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead:
“Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Máiréad Doyle 