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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

From OZY [ozy.com],

It was the third weekend of August, and an anti-sex trafficking rally was about to fill the streets of Salt Lake City. Except, late into Friday night, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes suddenly pulled the plug on the Saturday event. While it had originally been organized by legitimate nonprofits and government groups, its mission had been hijacked by the Arizona-based “Freedom for the Children” group — an organization whose founders traffic in the QAnon conspiracy theory that an elite cabal is secretly molesting children worldwide.

While that strange confluence of events may have surprised many, it didn’t surprise Lyric Jain, a 24-year-old, Cambridge-educated engineer who lives in the United Kingdom. In fact, his company, Logically — a news curator that uses artificial intelligence and other methods to tackle the spread of misinformation — had released an investigation a week before into dozens of similar child trafficking events that had been co-opted by QAnon for that same date. Its report included an interview with a Freedom for the Children founder Tara Nicole, in which she refused to deny that her beliefs aligned with QAnon, and the report made its way to the Utah attorney general’s office.

The incident highlighted the treacherous news landscape where both reporters and policymakers now tread, one in which even protecting children can be weaponized by extremists. But it also exemplifies the way fact checkers can fight back in new and varied ways, with people like Jain leading the charge.

A sample:

Of course, all the fact checking in the world can’t stop the spread of misinformation if people simply don’t want to change their views. “You can take the horse to the trough, but you can’t make them drink water,” Jain admits. He worries too that fact checkers broadly are still “playing catch-up” as propagandists increasingly move from open spaces — like a public Facebook feed or Twitter — to more hidden platforms, such as Facebook Messenger or private groups, as well as encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

“If we could say it was the same tactics and same actors at play, I’d be confident we have everything under control,” Jain says. “We have some idea the new tactics and new tools that are coming, but what we don’t know is what countries or organizations are hiding up their sleeve, perhaps for an October surprise.”

Original Submission