In Europe’s election season, tech vies to fight fake news
Source: Andreas Vlachos
London: In the battle against fake news, Andreas Vlachos – a Greek computer scientist living in a northern English town – is on the front lines.Armed with a decade of machine learning expertise, he is part of a British startup that will soon release an automated fact-checking tool before the country’s election in early June. He also is advising a global competition that pits computer wizards from the United States to China against each other to use artificial intelligence to combat fake news.
Andreas Vlachos, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield in England, is one of a growing number of researchers looking for ways to use artificial intelligence to combat fake news. Photo: NYT “I’m trying to channel my research into something that is useful for everyone who’s reading the news,” said Vlachos, who is also an academic at the University of Sheffield. “It’s a positive way of moving artificial intelligence forward while improving the political debate.”As Europe readies for several elections this year after President Donald Trump’s US victory, Vlachos, 36, is one of a growing number of technology experts worldwide who are harnessing their skills to tackle misinformation online.
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The French electorate heads to the polls in the second round of presidential elections Sunday, followed by votes in Britain and Germany in the coming months. Computer scientists, tech giants and start-ups are using sophisticated algorithms and reams of online data to quickly – and automatically – spot fake news faster than traditional fact-checking groups can.The goal, experts say, is to expand these digital tools across Europe, so the region can counter the fake news that caused so much confusion and anger during the US presidential election in November, when outright false reports routinely spread like wildfire on Facebook and Twitter.
“Algorithms will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting misinformation,” said Claire Wardle, head of strategy and research at First Draft News, a nonprofit organisation that has teamed with tech companies and newsrooms to debunk fake reports about elections in the United States and Europe. “It’s impossible to do all of this by hand.”With fake news already swirling around Europe’s forthcoming elections, analysts also worry that technology on its own may not be enough to combat the threat.
Posters for Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in advance of France’s presidential runoff election. Photo: Reuters “There’s an increased amount of misinformation out there,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a think tank in Riga, Latvia, that will hold a hackathon with local coders this month to find potential tech solutions to this trend. “State-based actors have been trying to amplify specific views to bring them into the mainstream.”Calls for combating fake news have focused on some of the biggest online players, including US giants like Facebook and Google.After criticism of its role in spreading false reports during the US elections, Facebook introduced a fact-checking tool before the Dutch elections in March and the first round of the French presidential election April 23. It also removed 30,000 accounts in France that had shared fake news, a small fraction of the approximately 33 million Facebook users in the country.Not everyone, though, has embraced Facebook’s response.Most German publishers, for instance, have balked at participating in the company’s fact-checking efforts, saying it is the responsibility of the social network, not them, to debunk such claims. German lawmakers are mulling potential hefty fines against tech companies if they do not clamp down on fake news and online hate speech.Since last year, Google also has funded almost 20 European projects aimed at fact-checking potentially false reports. That includes its support for two British groups looking to use artificial intelligence to automatically fact-check online claims before the country’s June 8 parliamentary election.It similarly has teamed with French newsrooms to create digital tools, including ways to track trending topics during that country’s election.David Dieudonne, head of the company’s news lab in France, said the project had debunked 43 reports since February , including claims that Saudi Arabia was funding the campaign of Emmanuel …
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