Here is the outline to the presentation on solutions to disinformation.

1. JRN 450 – Solutions
Rich Hanley
Associate Professor

2. Solutions
• Solutions to disinformation generally fall into four buckets.
• Media Literacy
• Content Moderation
• Prebunking
• Truth Sandwiches

3. Solutions
• Each solution, however, is flawed and to date has yet to work with
a promising degree of efficacy.

4. Solutions
• Media literacy
• Teaching people to think critically about the content they consume as news.
• Hard to do because of cognitive biases that send people to news that they
agree with already.
• People don’t like scolds.
• Usually comes down to the New York Times is good, Fox News is bad.

5. Solutions
• Content moderation
• At the scale of social media apps such as Twitter and Facebook, a combination
of human intervention and artificial intelligence must be deployed to detect
disinformation.
• That means both the human element and AI must have a context for
determining the “truth” from disinformation without presenting a bias toward
or against any particular perspective.
• The leads to the questions about who determines what is fact or not.
• The facts are open to interpretation based on how one frames information based on
experience, knowledge and gut instinct.
• Science, for example, has been wrong in the past. How do we know it’s right in one
case or another.

6. Solutions
• Content moderation
• In addition, human content moderators have been “captured” by
disinformation and will not remove content that they have come to believe.
• Take Facebook moderators, for example. Hundreds have bought into far
right beliefs after reading thousands of posts over the course of a given
month.
• There is also a lot of churn in employment.

7. Solutions
• Truth Sandwiches
• Journalists are, rightly or wrongly, held to standards that require balance in
stories by seeking opinions of people on each side of a matter.
• Disinformation operators know that the opportunity to smuggle their message
into mainstream media exists when journalists seek the other side of an issue
such as vaccines.
• By journalistic conventions, the other side’s message is spread.
• Journalists have developed what’s called a truth sandwich to defeat that while
maintaining fidelity to conventions of the craft.
• The truth sandwich consists of a paragraph asserting that the quote that follows
does not reflect reality. The quote is then presented, followed by a third
paragraph that restates the interpretation that the quote is factually incorrect.

8. Solutions
• Conclusion
• Each defense against disinformation is flawed in some way.
• The answer, however, is not to try to be perfect.
• In the disinformation world, perfect is the enemy of good.
• Try to devise a solution that is good enough to contain disinformation and at
least give the truth the opportunity to undermine it.