Meme warfare: AI countermeasures to disinformation should focus on popular, not perfect, fakes

Abstract

From QAnon conspiracy theories to Russian government sponsored election interference, social media disinformation campaigns are a part of online life, and identifying these threats amid the posts that billions of social media users upload each day is a challenge. To help sort through massive amounts of data, social media platforms are developing AI systems to automatically remove harmful content primarily through text-based analysis. But these techniques won’t identify all the disinformation on social media. After all, much of what people post are photos, videos, audio recordings, and memes. Developing the entirely new AI systems necessary to detect such multimedia disinformation will be difficult.