Five Challenges in Detection and Mitigation of Disinformation on Social Media

Abstract

This article discusses five challenges in detection and mitigation of disinformation on social media platforms. We discuss the limitations of fact-checking, the main mitigation strategy currently in place, against influence operations that leverage the low persistence and high ephemerality of social media posts to move from one contentious and unverified frame to the next before fact-checking mechanisms can correct false information. We argue that fact-checking, a tool originally devised to evaluate political claims and hold politicians to account, can rarely meet the scale, speed, velocity, and magnitude of mis- and disinformation on social media. We also argue that the conflicting priorities of privacy and safety championed by policymakers rendered social media platforms increasingly more opaque and paradoxically less accountable. We close with an assessment that mitigation strategies available to the academic community are severely limited, and that independent source attribution is near impossible in the wake of data access lockdowns.

Keywords: Disinformation, Social Media, Fact checking, Politics of deletion, Deletion policy, Firehose of falsehood