Microsoft has staked a claim in the growing field of “media literacy” and “digital literacy,” which aims to instruct members of the public – especially schoolchildren – in what types of digital media they ought to trust and distrust. As FFO has previously reported, media and digital literacy is the latest in a long string of pretexts by the ideologically biased censorship industry to prevent the public from accessing disfavored information sources.
In a 2023 blog post, Microsoft declared that “democracy depends on information literacy,” describing media literacy campaigns as a form of “information inoculation.”
Microsoft’s use of “inoculation” language echoes Google’s, the world’s largest search engine, which has run experiments on “psychological inoculation” methods, including exposing users to weakened versions of a disfavored narrative in order to prime them against it.
Microsoft’s blog post also cited research from Sander van der Linden, arguably the world’s leading advocate of “psychological inoculation,” whose disinformation research lab at the University of Cambridge is partnered with Google as well as DHS’s CISA, the center of government-backed online censorship in the 2020 U.S. elections.
Van der Linden describes the technique as follows:
Prebunking, trying to preemptively protect people before [the] damage occurs, is much more effective than debunking. So what the media described as a psychological vaccine against fake news is really based on the psychological theory of inoculation. So just as injecting yourself with a weakened dose of a virus triggers the production of antibodies to help protect you from future infection you can do the same with information by preemptively injecting people with a severely weakened dose of fake news.
Microsoft is using its resources to develop “anti-disinformation” tech, with some initiatives tackling tangible technological problems like AI-created deepfakes, while others address far more subjective questions such as the reliability of news websites.
The company has developed two technologies to help combat deepfakes, which includes Microsoft Video Authenticator, that can analyze a still photo or video to determine the potential for a manipulated photo.
The technology was developed by Microsoft Research with Microsoft’s Responsible AI team, and the Microsoft AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee, an advisory board at Microsoft to ensure AI is developed in a responsible manner.
Microsoft in 2020 announced a tool built into Microsoft Azure that enables content creators to add digital hashes and certificates to content. The second includes a reader, which can be included as a browser extension, to check the certificates to determine if the content is accurate and authentic. The technology was built in partnership with the Defending Democracy Program.
The Trusted News Initiative, which also includes many news publishers and social media companies, has also agreed to engage with this authenticity technology.
Microsoft partnered with the AI Foundation, a dual commercial and nonprofit enterprise to make its Video Authenticator available to organizations in the democratic process.
Microsoft also remains partnered with NewGuard, a browser plug-in news rating tool, whose rating system often skews heavily in favor of left-leaning sources and often targets conservative media outlets.
- NewsGuard creates blacklists and whitelists for advertising companies to steer advertising revenue away from targeted outlets.
- NewsGuard revealed they have worked with the Cyber National Mission Force of the U.S. Cyber Command
They also partnered with a consortium of media companies, which includes the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), CBC/Radio-Canada, and the New York Times on Project Origin to test the authenticity technology.
For instance, the My World Media Literacy program was developed between BBC Learning, BBC World Services, and Microsoft to create a free educational platform for students aged 11-14 to increase global media literacy.
Microsoft has also partnered with the News Literacy Project, led by the Trust Project, and also collaborated with Verified. The Trust Project serves as a nonprofit consortium of news organizations that direct internet users toward a list of eight “trust indicators” to assess a website’s credibility.
The Trust Indicators campaign, a collaboration between the Trust Project, the Radio Television Digital News Association, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (a member of the same DHS-created election integrity partnership that censored the 2020 election) and Accelerating Social Transformation program, produced a quiz asking participants to identify what would lead them to believe the news they are reading is trustworthy.
The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has received taxpayer grants to devise new strategies such as “virality circuit breakers” and “nudges” to prevent internet users from spreading content without being made aware they were being censored.
Microsoft also used its news service Start and Outlook advertising banners to promote NLP and Trust Indicators campaigns to reach 100 million consumers’ literacy messages.
Users of Microsoft products and systems including email saw the anti-misinformation ads. Over six months, the ads prompted twice as many people to visit the project’s site and three-fifths of those who visited the site felt more confident about assessing online information.
Sally Lehrman, the chief executive at the Trust Project, in June 2023 said that they were encouraged by the results of the Microsoft-NLP project, believing that short internet ads were more effective than complicated and divisive regulations or policies led by big tech platforms.
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Written by the staff reporters at Foundation for Freedom Online.
