From fa71a8493413c1eec54afea1e430d33e66785f68 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Sam Roizen <96695530+SamRoizen@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:49:00 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] Added footnote, re: Multi-source validation --- contents/english/6-3-media.md | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/contents/english/6-3-media.md b/contents/english/6-3-media.md index a6be5436..99051ec8 100644 --- a/contents/english/6-3-media.md +++ b/contents/english/6-3-media.md @@ -30,7 +30,9 @@ Yet these are only the first successful forays into an emerging medium. As shar One of the most important trends in the production of journalism in the internet era has been the rise of so-called "citizen journalism" and the allied "open-source intelligence" movement, both of which aim to empower a much broader diversity of people than those traditionally employed as formal journalists or intelligence analysts to document important events in the world around them. Such journalism has been central to documenting many of the most important events in recent years, from terrorist attacks to wars and police abuse. Yet it also faces significant criticism and social concern over bias, rigor of verification of facts, and legibility and digestibility. -It is easy to see how many recent technological developments could dramatically exacerbate these problems. Generative foundation models (GFMs) will make the production of realistic fakes far easier and will spread distrust of any material without rigorous, multi-source validation. The echo chambers of anti-social media will allow fakes to spread even absent such vetting, proliferating misleading content and the conditions under which people will believe it. +It is easy to see how many recent technological developments could dramatically exacerbate these problems. Generative foundation models (GFMs) will make producing realistic fakes far easier and will spread distrust of any material without rigorous, multi-source validation[^Note]. The echo chambers of anti-social media will allow fakes to spread even absent such vetting, proliferating misleading content and the conditions under which people will believe it. + +[^Note]: Multi-source validation is widely regarded as a standard in traditional journalism. Multi-source validation is the process of verifying information or data by comparing it across multiple independent sources. This is done as a means to protect the journalistic integrity of an outlet before confirming the validity of any information This is widely perceived as less important in modern media circles like blogs and social media, since the authors of the posts are often the source, themselves. Yet there are equally clear precedents for how technology could offset these challenges. Wikipedia has shown the speed and scale at which distributed participation can produce roughly and broadly consensual accounts of many events, though not quite yet at the speed required of journalism. Many of the tools we have described above and detail below can help address challenges of rigorous verification at distance and scale and rapid achievement of rough and socially contextual consensus that is a more appropriate frame for thinking about "objectivity".