The Global Disinformation Index:

[NNadir]

I'm on the mailing list for the AAAS blog, and there was a chat today on the AAAS blog with Dr. Danny Rodgers of the "GDI," the Global Disinformation Index.

It advertises a "neutral" approach to statistically rate the credibility of information.

Dr. Rodgers biographical info (from the website) is this:

Danny is a physicist, an author, and an expert in cryptography, cybercrime, disinformation, and security. He is a co-founder of Terbium Labs. Previously, Danny managed a portfolio of physics and sensor research projects at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He currently teaches in the Cybercrime and Global Security Masters Program at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and is a Security Fellow at the Truman Project on National Security.

From the "live chat" a participant asked:

Thank you for drawing attention to this issue.
Since so much of this disinformation seems to be disseminated via social media channels, can you recommend accessible sources for accurate information that folks could be referred to when responding to false claims?
Any success stories you might share for those if us struggling to reach people with accurate info?
Thanks!

...to which Dr. Rodgers replied:

First off, get off of Facebook. That'd be my first advice. Literally, the platform is designed to deceive you. Instead, go find reputable newspapers you trust and read (and subscribe!) to a few of those.

Remember, too, re platforms like Facebook: on the internet, when the product is free, YOU'RE the product.

The site, in their "research heading" describes their methodology:

Rating Disinformation Risk: The GDI Methodology
The GDI rating system takes a ‘whole-of-site’ approach to understand the risk of a news site disinforming its readers. Advertisers and ad tech companies can use the GDI ratings to shape brand safety decisions about where their ad spends end up.

[link:https://disinformationindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/GDI_Index-Methodology_Report_Dec2019.pdf|Rating
Disinformation Risk: The GDI Methodology]

A brief excerpt:

The ‘Structure’ pillar reviews news domains based on various metadata and computational signals. This pillar uses AI to assess these signals and rate a site’s disinformation risk in real time. The AI-based classifer automatically tags news domains using machine learning that has been developed from a training dataset of 20,000 domains. This automated review is particularly effective for assessing the ‘long tail’ of domains with a high disinformation risk. This pillar of the index is constantly updated and revised...

...The ‘Content’ pillar contains indicators that assess different elements of news articles published on a specific domain, including their credibility, sensationalism, neutrality and impartiality. As for all of the pillars, each of these indicators was chosen to identify and measure a specifc disinformation signal or fag (see Appendix A). How a domain’s content is presented and covered is an important indicator of the disinformation risk of the domain. Some of the more pernicious forms of disinformation occur when news domains present a variety of straight and accurate news with a few maliciously and purposefully inaccurate stories in order to gain and manipulate users’ trust…

...The ‘Operations’ pillar assesses the underlying policies and rules that domains abide by to establish trust and reliability in the quality of the news being published. The integrity of a news organisation and its site is a good indication of whether checks and balances are in place to prevent or lower the risk of disinformation from appearing on a site...

...The ‘Context’ pillar assesses the overall credibility and reliability of news-related information provided by a specifc domain. The overall conduct of a site can go beyond a sample of content and the operational policies in place. It relates to how the news domain is viewed: the overall perceived trustworthiness of the site. The disinformation fags assessed in this pillar are related to credibility, trustworthiness, conficts of interest and biasedness. As these signals are not easily measurable by analysts, this pillar and the questions in it are assessed by country-level experts working on media and related issues...

I have only superficially evaluated this Index, but the concept strikes me as interesting and worthy of some more study to understand their approach.

We certainly do live in the world of disinformation, driven not just by Rupert Murdoch and Fox "News" but by many others as well. A successful system like this might well help raise a level of critical thinking.

[Wounded Bear]

1. K & R...for visibility...nt