Bad information impacts all of us.
Scams threaten all of our finances.
Political misinformation undermines our democracy.
When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic,
health misinformation threatens all of our lives.
In human history, it has never been so easy to spread misinformation
to millions of people so rapidly.
My name is Laura Walters, I'm a journalist,
and I have been a victim of misinformation.
I got a cold call from a new website looking to publish news content.
Everything seemed very normal, like any other freelance commission.
I wrote the story on Chinese influence in New Zealand,
and then I literally thought nothing more of it.
And about three or four months later, I got a call.
Turns out that the FBI had actually tipped off Facebook.
This news organisation wasn't a news organisation at all.
It was the same troll farm
that meddled in the 2016 US presidential elections.
From there it's been a deep dive into learning about
how our networks are infiltrated to try and spread misinformation.
I could have completely avoided this situation
if I had applied the scrutiny in the same way that I do
when I'm investigating a story myself.
If I can show how it happened to me,
maybe I can help other people avoid it.
It's been a real wild experience for me.
It's important to remind people
of the dangers of information
and the new ways
that people can share information
that present risks to all of us,
but also the internet as a means of sharing good information.
Yes, we're all confronted with more information than ever
which makes it hard to tell fact from fiction,
but at the same time, fact-checkers like us
can use the internet and the reach that we have to correct the record
quicker than we ever could, and directly to people.
You can verify a story in many cases
by simply typing in
the claim that you're not very sure of
and putting "fact check" next to it, for example,
on your preferred search engine.
There's a very good chance that the top result
will actually take you to one of the fact checking organisations' website
that has already looked into that claim.
Fact checking organisations have looked into well over 100,000 claims
just when the pandemic started.
Within one year, they have looked at over 10,000 claims
only related to the pandemic.
There were quite a few stories circulating
that were false, that were offering very simple cures to the disease,
such as if you inhale steam.
-And that it would cure coronavirus just seemed completely illogical.
But when people are just overwhelmed by the amount of information
and they're scared and they're anxious,
it shows that they can believe things.
It's interesting, when we're sort of anxious
we have, on the one hand, a need to actively go out and find information
as a way of explaining what's going on, or even to help keep us safe.
But at the same time, the research shows
we also experience paradoxical inability to process complexity,
which, all together, means that when we are anxious
we are even more susceptible to bad information.
There are tools online to verify, for example, fake images.
One of them is Google reverse image search
where you put in an image and search for that image.
It is a really useful way
of seeing where that image originally came from.
Something like this would be a huge news story
so if it's not being reported by trusted news sources
that might be a clue that it's not actually true.
Deepfakes is a big concern,
and it's a growing concern, because it's completely new technology.
The wonderful world of deepfakes.
AI and VFX.
In the future that technology's going to be perfected
and then we would really struggle
to tell whether that video is not what it's meant to be.
And so more technology is coming out
that would help curb the spread of misinformation
in the form of plug-ins or that you could download
and attach to your browser.
They could tell you what's less credible and what's more credible.
Algorithms that could help the social media platforms
to detect automatically and very rapidly
which stories being circulated that are not true.
I'm quite hopeful on our ability
to tackle the spread of misinformation in the future
because more people are aware of the issue
because AI technology is becoming far more effective and powerful
in determining what is credible and what isn't
and then reducing, if not stopping the spread, of that misinformation.