Misinfotainment & Missinfotainment
Saurabh Khanna
In an age of information overloads, the unvarnished truth is often
not enough.
- Titles with positive and interesting framing receive higher
Altmetric scores (Lockwood, 2016)
- Top journals \(\to\) exciting
results of broad impact
- Goodhart’s Law
- Encourage hype, and worse still, fraud
Why is it so hard to identify truths (or conversely falsehoods)?
- Misinformation: Information consumed \(\ne\) ground truth
- Bias: [Information consumed \(\ne\)
ground truth] \(+\) discriminates
against a social group
- Ground truth?
A norm An exception on the Internet (Flanagin &
Metzger, 2000)
- Consider two statements:
- \(S_1\): The election was rigged
❌
- \(S_2\): People think the election was rigged ✅
- \(S_1\) and \(S_2\) have similar effect on the reader
(Tucker & Persily, 2020)
- Telling the reader \(S_1\) is False
doesn’t help either (Bail, 2021)
There is another (and much overlooked) complication.
Information on the Internet
Information on the Internet
Query the Internet
↓
Missing Information
↓
Information ranked by for us
Query the Internet
↓
Missing Information
↓
Information ranked by for us
↓
Missing Information
↓
We consume the tip of the iceberg
Text Embeddings as a Possible Solution
Text Embeddings as a Possible Solution
Text Embeddings as a Possible Solution
Reflections
- Hard problems
- Find the unvarnished truth
- Stick to the unvarnished truth
- Find missing perspectives
- Need for consciousness and humility
- Thoughts/Questions?
