This brief presents the findings of an experiment that measures how persuasive AI-generated propaganda is compared to foreign propaganda articles written by humans.
The online child safety ecosystem has already witnessed several key improvements in the months following the April publication of a landmark Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) report, writes Riana Pfefferkorn, formerly a research scholar at the SIO and now a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
A new Stanford Internet Observatory report examines how to improve the CyberTipline pipeline from dozens of interviews with tech companies, law enforcement and the nonprofit that runs the U.S. online child abuse reporting system.
Partisanship and social media usage correlate with belief in COVID-19 misinformation and that misinformation shapes citizens’ willingness to get vaccinated. However, this evidence comes overwhelmingly from frequent internet users in rich, Western countries. We run a panel survey early in the pandemic leveraging a pre-pandemic sample of urban middle-class Nigerians, many of whom do not use the internet.
Social media has been fully integrated into the lives of most adolescents in the U.S., raising concerns among parents, physicians, public health officials, and others about its effect on mental and physical health. Over the past year, an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examined the research and produced this detailed report exploring that effect and laying out recommendations for policymakers, regulators, industry, and others in an effort to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Focus areas include platform design, transparency and accountability, digital media literacy among young people and adults, online harassment, and supporting researchers.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have made it easy to create realistic disinformation that is hard to detect by humans and may undermine public trust. Some approaches used for assessing the reliability of online information may no longer work in the AI age. We offer suggestions for how research can help to tackle the threats of AI-generated disinformation.
A collaboration between the Stanford Internet Observatory and Thorn looks at the risks of sexual abuse material produced using machine learning image generators.
A new article in Social Media + Society uses three case studies to understand the participatory nature and dynamics of the online spread of misleading information.
A Stanford Internet Observatory investigation identified large networks of accounts, purportedly operated by minors, selling self-generated illicit sexual content. Platforms have updated safety measures based on the findings, but more work is needed.
