Combatting Online Harms Through Innovation
Amplification of trustworthy content and counter-disinformation campaigns An indirect way to address online harms is to increase user engagement with broadly trusted sources. Platforms and others can do so by generally amplifying such sources or specifically targeting those subject to harmful content or disinformation campaigns. 405 The State Department has expressed strong support of counter-disinformation measures, including debunking of false information. 406 The Surgeon General has advocated for technology firms to amplify information from trusted sources, 407 and both Facebook and YouTube have stated that they do so. 408 Dr. Erin Saltman of GIFCT has noted that providing counter-narratives or off-ramps to better information can be especially helpful for people who may be at high risk of succumbing to falsehoods but have not yet been converted to such views. 409 An example of this approach — one that relies in part on machine learning — is the Redirect Method, used by Moonshot and Google Jigsaw and discussed above in connection with TVEC. 410 Jigsaw and others are also studying the efficacy of prebunking, i.e., using technological tools to inoculate people against things like radicalization, extremism, and racism. 411 Two concerns with amplifying trustworthy content — or targeting and redirecting people to it — are who gets to decide what sources are authoritative, and to what extent will users believe them to be so.
F. User tools Some platform design features and third-party services are or could be made available to help individuals avoid harmful or sensitive content on their own. Unlike the back-end interventions
While the focus of such measures is often on platforms, others advocate for the primary role of civil society organizations in counter-disinformation measures. See Kevin Shieves, How to Support a Globally Connected Counter-Disinformation Network, War on the Rocks (Jan. 20, 2022) (noting that some of these groups use algorithms and other advanced tools and that generally they need appropriate data access, training, and funding), https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/how-to-support-a-globally-connected-counter-disinformation-network/. 406 See https://www.state.gov/Disarming-Disinformation/. 407 See Surgeon General, supra note 242 at 12. 408 See https://about fb.com/news/2018/01/trusted-sources/; https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/tackling-misinfo; https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/on-youtubes-recommendation-system/. 409 Saltman, et al., New Models for Deploying Counterspeech, supra note 185. 410 See https://moonshotteam.com/the-redirect-method/; https://jigsaw.google.com/the-current/whitesupremacy/countermeasures/; Emily Dreyfuss, Hacking Online Hate Means Talking to the Humans Behind It, WIRED (Jun. 8, 2017), https://www.wired.com/2017/06/hacking-online-hate-means-talking-humans-behind/. 411 See, e.g., Ullrich K. H. Ecker, et al., The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction, Nature Reviews Psychology 1: 13-29 (Jan. 12, 2022), https://www nature.com/articles/s44159-02100006-y; NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Inoculation Theory and Misinformation (Oct. 2021), https://stratcomcoe.org/pdfjs/?file=/publications/download/Inoculation-theory-and-Misinformation-FINALdigital-ISBN-ebbe8.pdf?zoom=page-fit; Beth Goldberg, Psychological Inoculation: New Techniques for Fighting Online Extremism, Jigsaw (Jun. 24, 2021), https://medium.com/jigsaw/psychological-inoculation-new-techniquesfor-fighting-online-extremism-b156e439af23; John Roozenbeek, et al., Prebunking interventions based on “inoculation” theory can reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Rev. (Feb. 3, 2020), https://misinforeview hks.harvard.edu/article/global-vaccination-badnews/. 405
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