Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for your invitation to appear today. My apologies for not being able to attend in person. I am Dr. Claire Wardle. I'm a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. I'm also the executive chair

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I would argue that deepfakes are an example of false information disseminated to cause harm, so that would be disinformation. Misinformation might be that my mom sees that deepfake later and she reshares that. She doesn't understand that it's false. My mom's not trying to ca

Information & Ethics committee  Regarding malinformation, we talk a lot about fabricated content or false content, but there is a way to use genuine content to cause harm. For example, leaking emails that were previously private and making them public might be a form of malinformation. There is a form of a whis

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  If you're on Facebook and you see a piece of content, you can add a reaction. It can be a happy face or—

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  When we are searching for content we put a search filter on that says to only find us content that has a disproportionate amount of angry emoji reactions, because people have an angry emotional reaction to a lot of this deceiving content.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, it leads to a lot of the false, misleading content. People who are perpetuating this understand that this is an emotional response, and so they are using material that makes you angry. If you look for those reactions, you end up finding a disproportionate number of these exa

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  No, it's a suggestion by Full Fact in a document they published last week, saying that we need a public database of ads. My point is they are specifically saying political ads. There are questions, of course, around how we define a political ad, when we know that the majority of

Information & Ethics committee  Exactly. They're saying that, at a minimum, there should be a transparent database, for example on Facebook, where people are paying to promote posts—essentially a form of advertising—around an election period.

Information & Ethics committee  One thing I would say is, as somebody was talking about, this isn't new. In an election campaign, somebody can, the night before an election, send leaflets to a whole constituency with a false rumour about a candidate. This issue that we would legislate around content is just not

Information & Ethics committee  A big part of our focus ends up being on technology, but we also need to understand what this technology sits on top of, and if we don't understand how societies are terrified by these huge changes we're seeing, which we can map back to the financial crisis.... We're seeing huge