How KM Can Team Up With AI to Fight Fake News

Description

In a post-truth world, objective facts have less influence on opinions and decisions than emotions and personal beliefs. People deliberately select those facts and data that support their preferred conclusions and classify any information that contradicts their beliefs as “false news..” This is not a recent problem but the Internet and social media allow information sharing at an incredible speed (practically real-time) and over a much greater geographic range (almost worldwide). There is also increasingly a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering information as most people read news through their social networks rather than independent news reports. How can knowledge management and AI technologies help in a post-truth world? Newer technologies such as artificial intelligence improve the efficiency and effectiveness of fact checking (e.g. through a news filtering agents that identify false news much as we identify junk email). We need to better educate our students and train our professionals so that they have the full range of literacies or meta-literacy needed to navigate in a post-truth world There is an interesting intersection of human (manual) methods to address post-truth (such as information literacy workshops and legal or policy changes to deter the spread of misinformation online) and a more automated, machine/AI-based approach (e.g. an algorithm that detects fake news dissemination patterns in social media). This webinar will bring together the different disciplines and research approaches to provide a comprehensive and effective toolkit to deal with information and knowledge in the post-truth era. KM can work in synergy with AI to help users navigate in this convoluted world of increasingly complex and dubious content. The only uncontested prediction is that the volume will only increase making its validation even more challenging. Key takeaways from the webinar will help participants accomplish the following specific objectives within their own organizations: 1) How can KM models help us develop organizational systems that are better equipped to withstand the onslaught of fake news? 2) How can KM and AI work together to identify fake news and alert both consumers and disseminators of this content? 3) How can we make use of KM models such as the McElroy model in order to increase our awareness, literacy and competency with respect to information overload and the increasing domination of fake news over real content? Javed Mostafa (JASIST), Jim Jansen (Information Processing & Management) and June Abbas (Library & Information Science Research) will share information on each of their journals and provide insight into how best to succeed in publishing with them.