By Anya Schiffrin, Columbia University
The year 2016 was a watershed year for misinformation. Much of the world looked on with fear and horror as the UK voted in favour of Brexit, Donald J. Trump was elected 45th President of the United States and Cambridge Analytica was revealed to be manipulating our data on Facebook to sway those elections. According to media think-tank Data & Society, “weaponisation of the digital influence machine” had taken place.
The horror gave rise to a flurry of ‘solutions’ to the problem of misinformation. But people wanted to take action before they actually knew what precisely the problem was and what would work. The intervening years have allowed us time to assess which of those responses was more effective and the advantages of each. And how the world moves in a decentralised way to combat problems like these as they arise.
