How can users discern the truth amid AI, fake news and social media? |
In the hours following the Bondi Beach shooting on December 14, people in Australia and around the world turned to digital platforms (social media and search engines but, since recently, also AI chatbots) seeking information about what had happened.
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In Australia, social media is the second most popular source of news after TV and as popular as online news sources. This is a routine response to crisis events: the public reaches for the nearest source of information, expecting answers.
What they encountered instead was a familiar pattern of chaos. As news outlets have since then documented, misinformation spread rapidly across platforms in the immediate aftermath. This is not a failure unique to this crisis, nor is it simply a matter of bad actors exploiting a tragedy. It reflects a structural vulnerability in how information circulates during crises, one that emerges from the interaction between public demand, digital platform infrastructure, and the time required for verification.
When a crisis strikes, the public presents a cup and demands it be filled. The size of the cup is determined by the scale and nature of the event. A terrorist attack at one of Australia's most iconic locations, during a Hanukkah celebration, is an enormous cup.
This creates an "epistemic gap": the space between what the public urgently wants to know and what authoritative sources can responsibly confirm. Journalists verify before publishing. Officials coordinate before speaking. These processes take time.
But the cup is already there, demanding to be filled.
Digital platforms are the infrastructure engineered to fill that cup as quickly as possible, drawing from an almost infinite supply of content. Their algorithms are attuned to thirst, not truth. They do not ask whether information is verified, only whether it is engaging.
This marks a fundamental difference from news media. When a major event occurs, news organisations can increase their output. They can reassign journalists, extend bulletins, and publish more frequently. But their capacity remains finite, constrained by the number of reporters they employ, the verification processes they follow, and the editorial judgments they make about what is ready to publish, as their credibility and jobs clearly........