What is it about?
Datavoidant is a collaborative system that enables a new design space where individuals can collaborate to make sense of their information ecosystem and actively devise strategies to combat disinformation.
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Why is it important?
Disinformation erodes the integrity of the information circulating on social media and reduces our capacity to make sense of it. For instance, disinformation is negatively impacting our elections, and it is even hurting people’s health by having them follow dangerous health conspiracy theories. Bad actors weaponize the limited information that exists about a political topic to promote disinformation, especially concerning an underrepresented population. When there is high demand for information about a topic, but credible information is non-existent or in low supply, creates data voids. The low supply can help the bad actors fill the void with their own ideological, economic, or political agendas more easily. Datavoidant is a collaborative system that enables a new design space where individuals can collaborate to make sense of their information ecosystem, find data voids, and actively devise strategies to fill them.
Perspectives
Until now, journalists have primarily adopted a reactive approach to combating the problem of disinformation where they use fact-checking and content moderation to take down problematic content. However, researchers and practitioners have recommended taking a more preventive approach to combat disinformation, especially because reactive approaches are often not enough to persuade audience members to change their minds. With Datavoidant, we aim to enable more system designs that proactively address disinformation. By helping journalists identify data voids, they can proactively create content to fill them and avoid disinformation campaigns weaponizing the voids.
Claudia Flores
Northeastern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social Media, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3555616.
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