Mitigating Online Misinformation and Disinformation

Civic Technology Community Group,

Misinformation and disinformation are prevalent online and acutely so during election seasons. Concurrently, an increase in the popularity and the availability of generative artificial intelligence technologies has raised related concerns. I am pleased to share that a proposed solution to these challenges is now available online: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/104 .

The proposed solution describes that public key infrastructures and digital signatures for news organizations and journalists can enable new user experiences for end-users involving clicking on the icons on the left of their browsers' address bars to interact with more general-purpose informational panels. As envisioned, these more general-purpose informational panels would provide: connection-security-related information, site controls, and content-authenticity-related information.

With respect to verifiably journalistic content with verifiably authentic multimedia content, new opportunities would also exist for both search engine optimization and social media, e.g., "news checkmarks" which would visually distinguish authenticated journalistic content from other forms of Web content shared on social media.

Thank you. Any thoughts on these topics, mitigating online misinformation and disinformation, in particular during election seasons?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski