Disinformation Countermeasures and Machine Learning (DisCoML)

The Disinformation Countermeasures and Machine Learning (DisCoML) workshop at ICML 2022 in Baltimore will address machine learning techniques to counter disinformation. Today, disinformation is an important challenge that all governments and their citizens face, affecting politics, public health, financial markets, and elections. Specific examples such as lynchings catalyzed by disinformation spread over social media highlight that the threat it poses crosses social scales and boundaries. This threat even extends into the realm of military combat, as a recent NATO StratCom experiment highlighted. Machine learning plays a central role in the production and propagation of dissemination. Bad actors scale disinformation operations by using ML-enabled bots, deepfakes, cloned websites, and forgeries. The situation is exacerbated by proprietary algorithms of search engines and social media platforms, driven by advertising models, that can effectively isolate internet users from alternative information and viewpoints. In fact, social media's business model, with its behavioral tracking algorithms, is arguably optimized for launching a global pandemic of cognitive hacking. Machine learning is also essential for identifying and inhibiting the spread of disinformation at internet speed and scale, but DisCoML welcomes approaches that contribute to countering disinformation in a broad sense. While the "cybersecurity paradox"–i.e. increased technology spending has not equated to an improved security posture–also applies to disinformation and indicates the need to address human behavior, there is an arms race quality to both problems. This suggests that technology, and ML in particular, will play a central role in countering disinformation well into the future. DisCoML will provide a forum for bringing leading researchers together and enabling stakeholders and policymakers to get up to date on the latest developments in the field.