Update: AMITT, Scores, ClaimReview

Last week, we talked about AM!TT, an approach to extending currently deployed infrastructure for coordinating efforts to resist information security attacks to also help with misinformation attacks. Most of us aren’t experts in that technology, so we didn’t get into the details during the hour, but it was a good start. Folks are encouraged to followup with the presenter (Sara-Jayne Terp), or the misinfosec group. Lots of notes, details, links, and slides in the meeting record.

Today, (the 50th anniversary of the internet) we talked about “credibility scores”, numbers people sometimes assign to content or content providers to indicate their “credibility” (or something vaguely like credibility, depending on the system). I can’t do justice to all the points of view presented (please read the meeting record for that), but I’ll highlight a few that struck me:

• There’s a difference between scoring the process and scoring the content produced. For a restaurant, there’s a kind of process review done by the health department, which gives one score, which is different from the reviews of how the food actually tastes.
• There’s another distinction between scoring done by professionals and experts (eg Michelin restaurant reviews) vs crowd sourcing (eg Yelp). They are each vulnerable to different kinds of manipulation.
• Some folks are quite skeptical that any kind of scoring could ever be net helpful. Others see great potential in systematizing scoring, aiming for something like “Mean Time Between Failure” numbers used in engineering some systems (eg airplanes) to be extremely reliable.
• There is clearly a danger here, as the scoring systems would be a major target for attack, and their vulnerabilities could make the overall media system even more vulnerable to misinformation attacks. Even if they are highly secure, they might not be trusted anyway.

Aviv agreed to start drafting a document to focus discussion going forward.

Next Week, we’ll have a presentation and discussion on ClaimReview. This is the technology which enables fact checkers to get search engines (at least Google and Bing) to recognize fact checks and handle them specially. It is a clear success story of how standard data interchange can help against misinformation, but much remains to be done. I expect we’ll hear more about plans and ideas for the future.

As usual, people are welcome to join the group, or just joint for a meeting of special interest to them.

     — Sandro