Hacking Fake News: How Hackers Can Help Fact Checkers

Presented at HOPE 2020 Virtual Rescheduled, July 28, 2020, 9 p.m. (60 minutes)

Fact checkers around the world are overrun. There's too much misinformation, too little time, too little data, and stakes that are too high. Hackers can help. Fact checking focuses on systems, on analysis and deconstruction, on bypass, on verification and hardening. Sound familiar?

Christopher will talk about how the worldwide community of hackers can help the fact checkers. How we can make information more available, more searchable. We can track falsehoods as they spread. We can investigate who's the cause and how the systems in place perpetuate or alleviate the dissemination of fake news. As the lead technologist at Duke University's Reporters' Lab, he has been at the head of bridging the gap of reporters and hackers for five years. This subject has been in the zeitgeist for a long time now and this talk will hopefully clear up, clarify, or expand on anything that's been on your minds.

Fake news is social engineering on a vast scale, and the consequences are real, dangerous, and increasingly deadly. Hackers and fact checkers both value truth - it's time to work on it together.


Presenters:

  • Christopher Guess
    **Christopher Guess** has been the lead technologist at the Duke University Reporters' Lab for the past five years where he helps lead a team dedicated to automating fact checking and making fact checking more accessible to the audience via policy, technology, and reporting. Previously, Christopher worked on organized crime and money laundering in Eastern Europe with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as a technologist for two years based in Sarajevo. In addition, he has been a working reporter in the U.S. and abroad, as well as founding multiple tech startups in his current base of operations in New York City.<br>

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