“The best antidote to disinformation,” McGowan says, “is increasing the volume of good, factual information” in the places where low-quality information is spreading. It’s a stark departure from the assumption long held in Congress, Silicon Valley, and European capitals that the answer is content moderation by the platforms themselves. Damon McCoy, an engineering professor at NYU, helps run the school’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project, which tries to identify and offer solutions to vulnerabilities in online platforms that let misinformation spread. “One of the things that’s starting to dawn on us,” he says, “is that misinformation takes hold where there’s a lack of credible news sources.” In those news deserts,
→ Continue reading at WIRED
