Social media has ushered in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Yet it has also allowed disinformation and so-called fake news campaigns to proliferate and flourish. Disinformation—which includes false and out-of-context information spread with the intent to deceive or mislead—is largely propagated by people looking to distort public opinion and advance particular agendas. Key is how they exploit the inherent openness and opaqueness of the content ecosystem,” explained Doowan Lee and Adean Mills Golub, two experts on disinformation analysis and the co-founders of Veracity Authentication Systems Technology (VAST). Disinformation can be propagated by a host of online actors, including governments, state-backed entities, extremist groups and individuals. For example, the World Economic Forum recently reported how one anonymous anti-Semitic account on the image board 4chan sparked a misinformation campaign that targeted the Forum. Click here to read full article