Digital Wildfire: (Mis)information flows, propagation and responsible governance

推特等社交媒体平台的快速发展对人们与他人即时联系和交流的方式产生了重大影响。用户放到社交媒体平台上的内容可以在几分钟内像病毒一样传播开来，这些内容，无论是文本、图片还是其他网站的链接，都可以在事件发生的过程中产生深远的影响。这可能是好事，也可能是坏事。在灾难发生时，在推特上发布有关事件的消息可以呼吁全球各地的人们提供帮助。但人们也可以通过社交媒体传播可疑和危险的信息、仇恨言论和谣言。这种行为被称为“数字野火”。世界经济论坛的一份报告指出了数字野火最危险的两种情况：在高度紧张的情况下，错误的信息或不准确的图像可能会在纠正之前造成损害。现实世界中的等价物是大喊“着火了！”在拥挤的剧院里--即使需要片刻才能意识到没有起火，在那段时间里，人们可能已经在争夺出口的过程中被压死了。另一种危险的情况是，当广泛传播的信息导致“群体思维”时，可能会抵制纠正它的尝试。这些数字野火可能严重挑战传统媒体、公民社会和政府在事件发生时准确报道和应对的能力。但人们在这些数字社交空间中是如何交流的还没有得到很好的理解；用户可能没有完全理解这些空间是如何作为交流渠道的，因此什么构成了适当和负责任的行为可能不清楚。因此，挑战是开发管理这些空间的适当方式，以及如何负责任地应用和使用它们。该项目将试图通过将这项研究纳入一项称为信息和通信技术负责任创新的工作方案，并制定一种研究和推进社会媒体负责任治理的方法，来应对这一挑战。一个关键的问题是，在这些空间里，人们在多大程度上“自我约束”自己的行为？如果这是显而易见的，那么就有理由探索如何放大自我纠正机制，以便更快地识别虚假谣言。如果新的治理机制尊重并建立这种现有的自治技术，其合法性可能会得到加强。借助一系列方法，我们将研究社交媒体是如何使用的，人们如何消费他们在那里找到的信息，他们在生产中扮演什么角色，(Mis)信息如何在实时传播时流动。我们将选取一些关于谣言和仇恨言论的案例研究，这些案例来自我们最近和正在进行的社交媒体研究。从这些分析中，我们将产生一个数字工具，以检测和可视化谣言、错误信息和敌对内容，以及这与反驳言论、消除谣言和核实做法等自律行为的关系，以便人们能够在更有见地的情况下做出决定，以应对现实世界的事件。我们还将在不同的地点(警察、社交媒体平台、谷歌、民权组织、新闻媒体)进行实地调查，以调查利益相关者如何应对事件带来的挑战，在这些事件中，通过社交媒体发布的错误信息、谣言和敌对内容可能是一个令人担忧的问题，例如在体育赛事、内乱和竞选活动期间。根据我们的分析，该项目将为管理社交媒体使用的做法制定一份道德安全地图。我们将用一系列成果来补充这一道德安全地图，以产生更广泛的影响，例如，与中学接触，在那里我们将为年轻人开发一个关于数字野火的反思和培训模块--年轻人是活跃使用社交媒体的最大年龄段之一，也是一个相对脆弱的社会群体。

The rapid growth of social media platforms such as Twitter has had a significant impact on the way people can connect and communicate instantaneously with others. The content that users put onto social media platforms can 'go viral' in minutes and that content, whether text, images or links to other sites, can have profound effects on events as they unfold. This can be both for the good or the bad. In times of disaster, tweeting about events can call people to help from around the globe. But people can also spread dubious and dangerous information, hate speech and rumours, via social media. This type of behaviour has been called "digital wildfires". A World Economic Forum report indicates two situations in which digital wildfires are most dangerous: in situations of high tension, when false information or inaccurately presented imagery can cause damage before it is possible to correct it. The real-world equivalent is shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre - even if it takes a moment for realisation to spread that there is no fire, in that time people may already have been crushed to death in the scramble for the exit. Another dangerous situation is when widely circulated information leads to 'groupthink' which may be resistant to attempts to correct it. These digital wildfires can seriously challenge the capacity of traditional media, civil society and government to report accurately and respond to events as they unfold. But how people communicate in these digital social spaces is not well understood; users may not fully understand how these spaces 'work' as channels of communication and so what constitutes appropriate and responsible behaviour may be unclear. The challenge then is to develop appropriate ways of governing these spaces and how to apply and use them responsibly. This project will attempt to address this challenge by framing the study in a programme of work known as Responsible Innovation in ICT and by developing a methodology for the study and advancement of the responsible governance of social media. A key question is to what extent do people in these spaces 'self-regulate' their behaviour? If this is evident then there is a case for exploring how self-correction mechanisms may be amplified so that false rumours are identified more quickly. The legitimacy of new governance mechanisms may be enhanced if they respect and build on such existing self-governance techniques. Drawing on a range of methods we will examine how social media are used, how people consume information they find there and what roles they play in its production; how (mis)information flows as they spread in real-time. We will draw on a selection of case studies of rumour and hate speech sourced from our recent and on-going research in social media. From the analyses we will produce a digital tool to detect and visualise rumour, misinformation and antagonistic content and how this relates to self-regulative behaviour such as counter speech, dispelling of rumours and verification practices, so that people are able to make better-informed decisions on how to manage emerging situations in response to real-world events. We will also conduct fieldwork at various sites (police, social media platforms, Google, civil rights organisations, news media) to investigate how stakeholders respond to challenges presented by events where misinformation, rumour and antagonistic content via social media may be a concern, for example, during sporting events, civil disturbance and electoral campaigns. From our analyses the project will develop an ethical security map for the practices of governing the use of social media. We will complement this ethical security map with a range of outputs for broader impact such as, engaging with secondary schools, where we will develop a reflection and training module on digital wildfire for young people - one of the largest age groups actively using social media and also a relatively vulnerable social group.