Challenging Online Propaganda and Disinformation in the 21st Century

Abstract

The move of propaganda and disinformation to the online environment is possible thanks to the fact that within the last decade, digital information channels radically increased in popularity as a news source. The main advantage of such media lies in the speed of information creation and dissemination. This, on the other hand, inevitably adds pressure, accelerating editorial work, fact-checking, and the scrutiny of source credibility. In this chapter, an overview of computer-supported approaches to detecting disinformation and manipulative techniques based on several criteria is presented. We concentrate on the technical aspects of automatic methods which support fact-checking, topic identification, text style analysis, or message filtering on social media channels. Most of the techniques employ artificial intelligence and machine learning with feature extraction combining available information resources. The following text firstly specifies the tasks related to computer detection of manipulation and disinformation spreading. The second section presents concrete methods of solving the tasks of the analysis, and the third sections enlists current verification and benchmarking datasets published and used in this area for evaluation and comparison.