Revista Scientific American 11/20. Inglés. Ciencia

Revista Scientific American Noviembre 2020. Inglés

ISSN: 0036-8733

Descripción

In August, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was interviewed on the New York Times podcast The Daily, where he was asked explicitly what his company will do if President Donald Trump uses Twitter to declare himself the winner of the 2020 election before the results have been decided. Dorsey paused, then provided a vague answer about learning lessons from the confusion that occurred in 2000 with the Florida recount and working with “peers and civil society to really understand what’s going on.” It was 88 days before the election, and my heart sank.

For those of us who study misinformation and investigate online efforts to interfere with democratic processes around the world, this election feels like our Olympics. It can be hard to remember just how different attitudes around the threat of false and misleading information were back in November 2016, when, two days after the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that it was “crazy” to suggest that fake news had affected the outcome. Now a misinformation field has emerged, with new journals inspiring cross-disciplinary research, millions of dollars in funding spent on nonprofits and start-ups, and new forms of regulation from the European Union Code of Practice of Disinformation to U.S. legislation prohibiting so-called deepfakes.

Planning for the impact of misinformation on the 2020 election has taken the form of a dizzying number of conferences, research projects and initiatives over the past four years that warned us about the effects of rumors, conspiracies and falsehoods on democracies. Recent months were supposed to be the home stretch. So when Dorsey failed to give a concrete answer to a question about a highly likely scenario, it felt like watching a teammate fall on their face when they should have been nailing the dismount.