Creating resilience against mass influence campaigns

With the volume of information – whether genuine or misinformation – available, how can we help people develop their critical thinking skills and build resilience against mass influence campaigns?

Dr Rachel Stephens is part of the Monitoring and Guarding the Public Information Environment (MAGPIE) project with Dr Keith Ransom and collaborators from the Universities of Melbourne, Western Australia, and South Australia, as well as DSTG and industry.

Key aspects of the work are funded by DSTG’s IW STaR Shot program and the SA Government’s Defence Innovation Partnership (DIP). MAGPIE is looking at how people interact with social media and what cues they use to make decisions on the authenticity or intent of content. She explains

“We know that one way people decide whether to believe a particular claim or not is by looking at consensus. If the claim has been supported in multiple messages, or shared by lots of people in their social circle, the likelihood of it being accepted as truth is much higher. The problem is that many people do not look at the quality of that consensus."

"Are the messages from credible, independent sources? Is there evidence to support the idea or activity outlined in a given message, and how reliable is the source of that evidence?"

"There are a range of techniques to help people navigate the public information environment. Fact checking tags and automated fact checkers have appeared throughout the various platforms in recent times, but our MAGPIE project aims to provide a transdisciplinary solution which not only looks at the computer and data science aspects of this environment but also considers individual cognition and how people communicate or influence each other."

The aim is to develop an automated, interactive tool which can help people critically assess the consensus behind a claim, which will result in a healthier, more resilient and better-informed online environment.