Protecting Truth in the Digital Age
We monitor, analyze, and combat disinformation to preserve the integrity of public discourse.
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On a humid October afternoon in Colombo, a roomful of election officials, journalists, and civil society activists gathered not to debate poll numbers or campaign strategies, but to confront something far more elusive and corrosive: the quiet, often invisible manipulation of the digital spaces where democracy now lives. The occasion…
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There is a particular kind of trust we place in the people whose job it is to find us when we vanish. We assume that when a desperate family walks into a police station to report a missing loved one, the officer on the other side of the desk will do everything possible to bring that person home—or at least give the family honest answers along the way. On the island of Jeju, that trust has been shaken to its core. A 34-year-old former police officer, identified only as A, has been detained and indicted after an investigation revealed a…
Imagine an official government chatbot, created to fight fake news, that ends up generating fake news. That is the strange reality of RSA Facts, a pilot project run by the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) and linked to the government’s main website and social media pages. The bot is hosted on gov.za/rsa, a page that promises to help citizens “identify and respond to misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” During our tests, it did the opposite. We asked the chatbot to write an official-sounding SASSA statement about the Social Relief of Distress grant. At first, it refused. It correctly explained that…
