What we learned at Cardiff Conversations: Navigating Disinformation with Babita Sharma

What is disinformation?

Disinformation involves communications deliberately designed and delivered to mislead. It is closely aligned and sometimes overlaps with propaganda, conspiracy theories and misinformation, which is unintentionally misleading. The first written reference to misinformation in English language was 1601 during the English Civil War.

Warning signs

Research shows that as individuals, we see ourselves as least responsible for stopping the spread of disinformation; members of the panel argued against this and emphasised the agency we each hold in dealing with online media and potential disinformation.

According to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Elon Musk’s political posts on X have now amassed more than 17 billion views, with 87 of them promoting claims that have been rated ‘false or misleading’ by independent fact checkers.  Disinformation is about our shared reality and our ability to make informed decisions, so the role of fact-checking and reviewing is going to be even more important in future.

AI is a vital part of the conversation around disinformation as it becomes increasingly difficult for the average person to distinguish fact from fiction. There’s a documented lack of diversity in AI development, causing huge concern, because it leads to a perpetuation of societal biases. Language models struggle to represent or understand cultural nuances. Facial recognition technologies have a higher error rate for women and people of colour due to inadequate representation in training datasets.