Facebook, Twitter set to fight fake news during Democratic debates
By Elena Shao
As the Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare for debates Wednesday and Thursday nights, engineers and other specialists at Facebook and Twitter are steeling themselves for a different kind of contest...
Teams of Facebook and Twitter employees will be on alert for fake accounts, viral hoaxes, inauthentic attempts to get hashtags trending and other forms of deliberate deception that aim to distort the views and color the perception of the 20 candidates...
Although all of these efforts are necessary, they are “almost certainly not sufficient,” said Hany Farid, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information, who is working with Facebook on developing new technologies to detect fake news, images and videos.
“Big Tech has been far too slow to respond to this threat,” he added, “particularly given (that) we know how disinformation was used in the last national elections and how it has been used to disrupt elections around the world.”
Hany Farid is a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and EECS. He specializes in digital forensics.
