Digital Earth - Cyber threats, privacy and ethics in an age of paranoia

CHAPTER FOUR: DISINFORMATION VERSUS MISINFORMATION IN A POST-COVID WORLD

Because of the controversy surrounding foreign fake news that allegedly influenced the 2016 presidential elections in countries such as France and the United States, concern over the ubiquity of this misinformation has skyrocketed in the past two years. In particular, many social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, have received major backlash for failing to effectively protect their users by not monitoring fake news more closely, both in terms of health news as well as politics. Perhaps most interestingly, the need to differentiate between deliberate disinformation by mal-intentioned entities versus the more often accidental misinformation shared by misinformed ...