Artificial intelligence (AI) is needed more than ever to combat disinformation as it becomes more prevalent on video-based platforms such as YouTube and TikTok than in text-based formats, a Taiwanese expert said during an international panel discussion on Thursday.
Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾) said that his company found a rise in troll accounts in the run-up to Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections that disseminated false information using short videos and that AI tools were used to identify the accounts.
Tu was speaking at a livestream event held by the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on how AI tools have changed the information ecosystem and how governments and the public would respond to new challenges.
Photo: Reuters
His company observed a large amount of coordinated activity on social media platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Professional Technology Temple bulletin board system and TikTok ahead of Taiwan’s elections in January, he said.
They “appeared together and disappeared together,” which is a clear sign of coordinated activity that is characteristic of troll groups, Tu said.
Troll accounts are “referencing short videos now,” a different approach to spreading information from using text, which was their preferred method in the past, he said, adding that the deepfake videos on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok used different backgrounds and voices, but trumpeted the same narratives.
“We used AI speech recognition and language understanding tools to identify the troll accounts and cluster the stories they were trying to spread,” Tu said.
There have been peaks of troll activity when events with political significance take place, such as President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) visit to the US in April last year and when US President Joe Biden said the US would defend Taiwan if China attacked, he added.
When asked by moderator Anya Schiffrin — senior lecturer on international affairs at Columbia University — whether China could be identified as the source of the troll activity, Tu said it could, adding: “By using AI and grouping the same narratives together, we found that the troll accounts on social media platforms echoed the narratives of China’s state-affiliated media.”
Many of the troll accounts “try to emphasize China’s military strength,” suggesting a link to China, he said.
The panel discussion also touched on regulations in place to monitor disinformation on social media platforms and the difficulties content moderation entailed.
Tu said that in Taiwan’s case, fact checking and content moderation would face a lot of challenges, because “people would say that was against freedom of speech and there would be debate over what ‘fact’ is in fact checking.”
So, instead of fact checking or content moderation, Taiwan now focuses more on information manipulation disclosure, he said.
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