News & Reviews:   misinformation

At the start of the new year, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) issued a strong warning against the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate harmful content online. The regulator says it has received numerous public complaints involving AI-powered image manipulation, particularly cases targeting women and minors.

According to MCMC, these incidents involve digitally altered images that result in indecent, grossly offensive, or otherwise harmful material being circulated on social platforms, including X.

Fake news has been a thing even before the pandemic and we have been combating it ever since. In an effort to curb misinformation from spreading further, our local Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil announced that there will be a new AI-powered chatbot on WhatsApp to do fact-checking. 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that misinformation can be deadly as the covid-19 virus. A huge amount of misinformation has been spread through social platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp more than before due to the pandemic. To combat this, Facebook has been actively banning 3000 accounts (and counting), groups and pages from doing so.

Today, Vice President of Twitter Keith Coleman has announced a new feature for the social platform called Birdwatch. As the title suggests, it's a new way for the Twitter community to report and prevent misinformation news spread around online. Here's how it works on Twitter.

In an effort to reduce the spread of misinformation, Twitter has officially implemented a feature where it will prompt users if they were to press "Like" a disputed tweet. Prior to this, Twitter implemented a similar prompt to the “Quote Tweets” functionality which has decreased the spread of misinformation by up to 29%.

When it comes to information, the wrong kind is often harmful. With the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading misinformation is the last thing we need. Facebook has been working on this in recent weeks, using a global network of fact-checkers and an AI to prevent the spread of wrong info. But it seems that the AI for Facebook Ads isn't doing too good of a job.