Ep. 18 - Combating FakeNews at Home and Deepfakes in the Courtroom

In this special episode of May it Displease the Court, a podcast about how unjust the court system has always been, but especially in this age of rampant misinformation, produced specifically for The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival. The Carnival runs from August 16-19, 2021. Check out participating podcasts who all produced episodes incorporating this year’s theme “Contending with Misinformation in the Community and the Classroom”. The Carnival culminates with the keynote speaker, Dr. Renee Hobbs, Professor of Communication Studies at the Harrington School of Communications and Media and Founder of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island. 

Mary Whiteside, an attorney, is joined by expert guest, Dr. Amanda Cronkhite, an assistant professor at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. Dr. Cronkhite’s research focuses on the role of media and information in politics and national security. Her latest published research looks at #FakeNews and the handling of misinformation in the media.

This episode looks at how misinformation spreads throughout populations, as well as how easy it has become to create deep or cheapfakes, which may become a problem in courtrooms. Here are the highlights:

MAIN POINTS:

1) A small percentage of social media users share an overwhelming majority of the mis/mal or dis-information out there, especially if it confirms their existing prior biases. 

2) Strategies for combating misinformation or mal-information include:

1. teach individuals to check for fact-checking articles about a news story
2. trace the source of information 
3. read laterally, that is, check other sources' evaluations of the story's source

3) One type of misinformation, deepfakes, which are videos produced or altered to present content that never occurred in real life and the technology to produce videos has evolved so quickly that now it can be done cheaply even from a single image. Mary and Dr. Cronkite explore weather deepfakes can create a big enough doubt to be reasonable so often that they create a “liar’s dividend” as described in (Chesney and Citron 2019) that undercuts the existing legal system?

Resources

• mis/dis/mal-info written: https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-report-november-2017/1680764666
• mis/dis/mal-info video: https://www.weareiowa.com/video/news/local/explaining-the-difference-between-disinformation-misinformation-and-malinformation/524-151c0a53-76d8-4481-842f-116a527f5ad4
• Kahneman book https://bookshop.org/books/thinking-fast-and-slow/9780374533557
• Peter W. Singer on media literacy https://time.com/5932134/cyber-citizenship-national-priority/
• Estonia & media literacy https://www.educationestonia.org/finland-denmark-and-estonia-top-the-media-literacy-index-2021/
• Foreign Service https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/officer/
• The Conversation is a website where scholars write about their work for the mass public.