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What Congress, Tech companies, the PRess, and The Public CaN do about disinformation

As we learn more about the strategies and tactics used to create and spread disinformation and the dynamics by which misinformation spreads, it’s critical for all of the different stakeholders to act deliberately, consciously, and effectively....

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How Adding Friction To Group Messaging Can Help Defuse Disinformation

Given reports of Facebook's plans to unify Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, the feature changes it makes will affect billions of people. "Code is law," in this context, and although nations should not cede governance to the tech giants that operate the planetary platforms of our age, these kinds of changes can address the new problems the companies have introduced....

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How Sunshine Could Prevent “Trolling as a Service” from Becoming Normal in Politics

Mandating that commercial firms that sell "trolling as a service," create sock puppets or set up "false news" pages disclose that work would help mitigate misinformation....

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Introducing the Defusing Disinformation Project

Defusing disinformation and mitigating misinformation have become critical needs for democracies everywhere. That's why this project exists. Let's get started!...

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Yochai Benkler

Harvard Law professor

"But the level of bile and sheer disinformation that characterized the 2016 election is such that perhaps raising the cost of reckless or intentional defamatory falsehood as a business model, at least, is a reasonable path to moderation of the most extreme instances of falsehood."

Samantha Bradshaw

Oxford Computational Propaganda Project

“In many countries, messaging services are the main platform to get online. The closed platforms can be more dangerous because the information is spreading in these intimate groups of friends and family — people we tend to trust.”

Zeynep Tufecki

Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science

"Friction is good for a messaging app, especially an end-to-end encrypted one. Yes, it will slightly inconvenience some people but it will keep Whatsapp from veering more into the virality lane while preserving communication."