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Designing Social Machines for Tackling Online Disinformation

Published: 20 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Traditional news outlets as carriers and distributors of information have been challenged by online social networks with regards to their gate-keeping function. We believe that only a combined effort of people and machines will be able to curb so-called “fake news” at scale in a decentralized Web. In this position paper, we propose an approach to design social machines that coordinate human- and machine-driven credibility assessment of information on a decentralized Web. To this end, we defined a fact-checking process that draws upon ongoing efforts for tackling disinformation on the Web, and we formalized this process as a multi-agent organisation for curating W3C Web Annotations. We present the current state of our prototypical implementation in the form of a browser plugin that builds on the Hypothesis annotation platform and the JaCaMo multi-agent platform. Our social machines would span across the Web to enable collaboration in form of public discourse, thereby increasing the transparency and accountability of information.

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  • (2025)Dominant Disciplinary and Thematic Approaches to Automated Fact-Checking: A Scoping Review and ReflectionDigital Journalism10.1080/21670811.2024.2427036(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2025
  • (2022)Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556166:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla moddingNature Machine Intelligence10.1038/s42256-021-00424-w3:12(1008-1010)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '20: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020
April 2020
854 pages
ISBN:9781450370240
DOI:10.1145/3366424
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Decentralization
  2. Disinformation
  3. Linked Data
  4. Multi-Agent Systems
  5. Social Machines
  6. Web Architecture

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WWW '20
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WWW '20: The Web Conference 2020
April 20 - 24, 2020
Taipei, Taiwan

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Dominant Disciplinary and Thematic Approaches to Automated Fact-Checking: A Scoping Review and ReflectionDigital Journalism10.1080/21670811.2024.2427036(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2025
  • (2022)Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556166:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla moddingNature Machine Intelligence10.1038/s42256-021-00424-w3:12(1008-1010)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2021
  • (2020)Proactive Digital Companions in Pervasive Hypermedia Environments2020 IEEE 6th International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC)10.1109/CIC50333.2020.00017(54-59)Online publication date: Dec-2020

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