Fake news has become a growing concern worldwide. During the pandemic, we have seen several misleading campaigns take advantage of people. Cybercriminals were taking advantage of the chaos to accelerate their phishing campaigns. Google was blocking over 18 million phishing emails related to Covid-19 daily.
While advertising, on the one hand, is helping businesses and influencers create brand awareness quickly, it is also fueling fake news. There can be several reasons to spread fake information. It can be to lure content consumers to take specific actions, spread wrong perceptions, or for political reasons.
Common among the agendas of spreading fake news is wrong intentions. Hence, it is vital to combat such fake advertising, and the best way to do this is by using technology.
The primary benefit of technology and machines over humans is their sheer capability to consume and analyze big data. Here’s how some technologies are helping fight fake news.
Identity Verification Solutions to Combat Fake News
Identity verification solutions with real-time authentication capabilities can help mitigate fake news.
The Problem: Fake Profiles
To spread wrong information, a person requires a platform. Social media platforms and publishing websites are the primary targets for these people.
A person can easily create a fake profile on a website if the regulation is not powerful enough. The same is true with social media platforms. Most platforms require only filling out a basic registration form to create profiles. In such cases, anyone can use fake profiles and spread false news.
The Solution: Authenticating Profiles
Leveraging digital identity verification solutions can help fight fake news by linking a specific post with the user. It helps authenticate the true identity of who is posting what information.
Identity verification solutions can verify if the profile is genuine. They can also detect whether the documents and IDs provided by the user are actual or synthetic through multi-layer authentication. You can consider the example of AU10TIX. At AU10TIX, they use ten different layers to obliterate fake accounts or identity thefts.
Hence, only a genuine user who is traceable can create profiles on publishing websites or social media platforms. With such strict regulations, anyone would think twice before spreading fake news.
The Solution: Leveraging Contextual Data
Identity verification solutions also help go beyond just IP address tracking. Anyone can mask IP addresses with VPNs, and everyone knows that. Hence, relying on IP addresses for tracking users is not enough.
A better way to overcome the IP address issue is by linking the legal documents with the account. Identity verification will also help alert for any suspicious documents. You might have to store these documents securely, but you will find hundreds of Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to help you with that.
A publishing house or social media platform regulators would think, why to put users through all the hassle. After all, a long registration time can impair the brand or platform’s image. But with advanced technologies, onboarding new users through identity verification has become seamless. You can assist new users in completing the authentication and getting onboarded within minutes.
Fighting Fake News With Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven a double-edged sword for fake news. It is also helping spread such information, and it is also preventing it. Hence, it depends on the user how he wants to use AI.
The Problem: Deepfakes
Deepfake refers to the process of creating synthetic media. It leverages modern-day technologies like AI and deep learning to develop real-like images and videos.
The deepfake content appears so natural that detecting it is almost impossible by humans. Such unreal content can be disastrous. For instance, a political party released a low-quality deepfake of Donald Trump. Although the synthetic content was of low quality, it received a lot of traction, demonstrating the potential of high-quality fakes.
The Solution: Fighting Deepfakes
While AI helps create deepfakes, it can also help detect them. It can go over a vast amount of data to collect minute details. Let’s consider an example of Tom Cruise. AI can scan and go through all the audios and videos of Mr. Cruise. It will then gather details like how often he blinks, pauses while speaking, body gestures, etc.
The AI-accelerated solutions can match the information with the deepfake audios and videos to detect fake news. Simultaneously, AI can scan each concurrent frame individually to detect inconsistencies and report wrong information.
The Solution: Contextual Analysis
AI is penetrating almost every industry. Thanks to its machine and deep learning algorithms, AI can help combat fake news. Combined with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), these algorithms can scan every news piece.
By scanning the information, AI can also build context around each word. Hence, AI can mark the data as fake if any keyword highlights false claims. Also, AI algorithms can auto-improve based on historical experience. So, the solutions can eventually become more and more efficient.
The problem of fake news is significant. The sad part is that such news spread more quickly than real news. Everyone’s support is necessary to fight wrongful information. Advertisers can play their role by choking the funds of fake news publishing websites.
They can also assist in spreading digital literacy so that the consumers can use cognitive skills and technical tools to distinguish between real and fake news. When everyone is educated about combating technologies, we can obliterate fake news from roots.