By Sora Park, Tanya Notley, T. J. Thomson, Aimee Hourigan, Michael Dezuanni

The rapid uptake of social media, which Australians now use more than any other type of media, presents many opportunities for accessing information, but also presents the highly significant challenge of misinformation. The sheer volume of information online can be overwhelming and very difficult to navigate. As a result, bad actors seek to undermine democratic processes and target individuals. This has been widely recognised as a global problem. However, Australians lack the confidence and ability to verify misinformation.

This report is based on analysis of four linked datasets and finds that the vast majority of adult Australians want to be able to identify misinformation and are trying to do so. It also finds that many adult Australians overestimate their ability to verify information online.

The research findings illustrate the need for media literacy initiatives. These might include videos that show people how to fact check online or how to identify high-quality news sources, quizzes or games that help people develop their digital media knowledge and skills, explainers that show how platform business models operate and how this relates to the spread of misinformation, or in-person media production training that can help people think critically, and accurately represent people, places and ideas.

Penrith, AUS: News and Media Research Centre, Western Sydney University, 2024, 82p.

By Dr Ben Collier, Dr Morgan Currie, & Dr Benedetta Catanzariti

We are a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s department of Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies, with a broad range of expertise and experience relating to digital technologies. The Scottish Parliament has commissioned us to conduct this research study evaluating the potential threats, risks, and mitigations to parliamentary business associated with novel generative AI technologies. We have been asked to consider particularly the threat of deepfaked video to the integrity of the Parliament video livestream and archived recordings of parliamentary business - a phenomenon which one of our participants dubbed ‘chamberfakes’. Scottish Parliament makes its live streamed and archived video of chamber and committee business widely accessible to major broadcasters and to the public directly through its website and on major social media platforms. Parliamentary video is produced as a neutral record of parliamentary business, and its accessibility serves a core democratic function of making the Scottish Parliament visible to the public. At the same time, this broad accessibility could lead to security vulnerabilities, including deepfake attacks. The report identifies three main deepfake-related risks: 1. Hacking the video livestream, either through a cybersecurity breach or by compromising a live participant dialing in through Zoom 2. Disseminating deepfakes on social media platforms 3. Creating deepfakes using parliamentary video material as a training resource for online harassment and abuse of MSPs While deepfake technologies are part of concerning broader trends in the proliferation of misinformation, abuse, and organised political interference, they do not generally represent a step change in capabilities for most hostile actors in the context of Parliamentary video. Instead, they generally offer small-to-medium scale reductions in barriers to entry for some existing forms of harm. Scottish Parliament has no formal processes in place to respond to these deepfake threats. However, Parliament’s strong institutional resilience - particularly the deep knowledge and experience of its staff - can play a current role in preventing or mitigating threats. The broadcasting team has multiple people who monitor both the live transmitted video and online video stream, ensuring the video transmission chain proceeds correctly. Parliament’s strategic risk register is already set up to respond to cybersecurity and personal online security threats to MSPs. The Official Report of Parliament, the transcript of all the Parliament's public proceedings, offers a record to check video suspected of tampering. Beyond current practices of risk management there are several technical, educational and legal solutions that could be adopted as future mitigations to deepfake risks. Considering deepfakes in relation to a broader constellation of risks and finding an optimistic picture of the resilience of Parliament to these threats, this report focuses its recommendations on several key institutional solutions that Scottish Parliament could adopt. Recommendations: 1. Develop formal intervention plan and reporting procedures for a deepfake or misinformation attack, involving the assignment of responsibility for this process to a specific individual via the risk register and establishing reporting procedures to UK Parliament and ministers and to MSPs 2. Institute further material and human-in-the-loop checks, including having cameras dump a live feed to file locally straight from the recording apparatus itself, authentication checks for participants dialling in to give evidence, and retaining an in-house staff to monitor the feed in comparison with live proceedings 3. Establish a communications team (or hire a small number of dedicated communications staff) within the broadcasting unit to support to MSPs who encounter or are victims of misinformation, track how parliamentary content is being circulated and used, and promote the use of parliamentary video through communications campaigns and direct engagement with broadcasters and platforms

Edinburgh: The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR), 2024. 29p.

By Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

Cham: Springer, 2022. 280p.

By Asta Zelenkauskaitė

With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 318p.