Misinformation – false or inaccurate information – and its rampant spread is a major issue today, and can influence how we access, think about, and respond to critical information.
“[It is] very much harmful in regards to the ways that people take information and pass it along. So if one person believes something, they post it on social media. Their friend group says it, it spreads and it just… creates these larger issues,” according to Jabari Gibbs, an accountability reporter for The Current.
Especially in the face of an election season misinformation, and disinformation – false information meant to mislead others – can influence voters, affect the outcome of elections, and lead to social unrest.
“When you talk about the nation, especially when you have certain candidates that perpetuate notions that are not true, you definitely see an uptick. You see a rise in that misinformation around election season,” said Gibbs. “And if individuals may feel like the election is stolen from them, for instance…they may not want to go [and vote] for fear of being attacked and whatnot, in whatever form that may be.”
With regards to misinformation and disinformation, Georgia Southern professor Dr. Hayden Wimmer, who earned a Ph.D in Information Systems from University of MarylandBaltimore County, has seen a rise in the spread of fake news via artificial intelligence, also known as AI.
“Let’s say we’re talking about Donald Trump or Kamala [Harris] or whoever. It [AI] can go out, and scrape articles from different outlets and then feed them into AI and generate a new article. So we’re starting to see AI generated content pop up like that…where it’s AI that’s just reassembling data from interviews that have already occurred. And in that case, it’s incredibly difficult to tell, because the companies that do this will just give a fake author name.”
An increase in misinformation and rumors can also lead to a general mistrust of government resources, as in the case of misinformation surrounding FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) involvement after Hurricane Helene, as well as major scams.
“It used to be before computers, you would get a letter in the mail, telling you to do these things…send money or send cash. Now you get them in emails,” said Wimmer.
“What we’re starting to see more and more of on the internet is AI generated content, and it’s gotten to the point where a lot of these AI systems are so good that a human can’t detect whether it’s real or fake. So that poses a problem, and it’s getting to the point where only artificial intelligence can detect other artificial intelligence,” he said.
Although some AI-generated content (like student work completed by ChatGPT) can be easily detected by humans, Wimmer says that it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence gets over that hurdle.
“Open AI is getting billions of dollars in investments, so they will get over that hurdle. And we’ve done multiple research studies now on large language models like ChatGPT and also image generation models. It’s getting to the point where I can generate a video of Trump or Kamala or whomever, have it say whatever I want to say, and it’s going to be difficult for a human to look at that video and know that it is not that person.”
Combating Misinformation
When it comes to combating misinformation and disinformation though, there are steps you can take to make sure you’re getting the most accurate information possible.
“Read your local news sources. They generally are a good source of credible information…you don’t want your news diet to be dominated by social media. You don’t want to get a lot of your news on Facebook, Instagram, [or] Tiktok,” said Gibbs.
“I think the most important thing…is teaching people to think critically. Somebody sees an article on CNN or Fox News, and they just believe it. Somebody posted [information on social media] so now I believe it’s true, and now I repost it without thinking critically about the content and without doing my own back end research,” said Wimmer. You have to ask yourself, “Have I done any research to verify that? Have I corroborated it with other sources?”
