Technology, old-school journalism key to combat disinformation: Foreign media

Taipei, July 1 (CNA) Modern technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) is useful in combating disinformation, but "old-school" journalistic approaches such as good storytelling and on-site reporting also have a crucial role, international media outlet executives told a forum held by CNA Monday.

As part of events to mark its centennial, CNA organized an international forum on challenges to today's news industry and proposed solutions at the Grand Hilai Taipei.

During a panel discussion on news media manipulation and cognitive warfare, Michael Mainville, Asia-Pacific regional director for Agence France-Presse (AFP), presented two methods to counter disinformation.

Media outlets should directly tackle disinformation on a "massive scale," Mainville said.

The AFP, for example, has a network of 150 journalists producing 700 fact checks a month in 26 languages, he said.

With the help of digital tools such as the inVID verification plugin, which the AFP helped develop, journalists at the agency are able to perform reverse searches of videos and images and gain instant access to the metadata in photos to track down "where the photos came from" and determine whether they may be fakes, he said.

At the same time, media outlets should "double down on the fundamentals of journalism -- on-the-ground reporting," Mainville said, adding that this is "very much part of AFP's DNA."

"The best way to fight it (disinformation) is to provide reliable firsthand reporting of the facts," he said. "And for that, you need to be where the news is happening, on the ground, reporting what you see, and talking to the people who are affected by the news."

Debarati Guha, director of programs for Asia at Deutsche Welle (DW), said as much as AI is a major tool used to produce fake news, it could also prove useful to counter it, citing AI tools used by editors at DW.

"AI is a tool, so use AI to counter AI and fact check," she said.

Guha also stressed the crucial role of "good storytelling" in journalism.

Good storytelling goes "deep into the news" and engages members of younger generations whose news sources are Instagram and TikTok.

"This is a reality which we cannot change, but if you do a good explainer, they would watch it." Guha said. "So I think storytelling is the key."

At the event, Ukrainian writer/journalist Maksym Eristavi was asked by CNA Vice President Chen Jen-jey (陳正杰), who moderated the panel, to discuss his new book "Russian Colonialism 101."

Eristavi said he decided to write the book after seeing many media outlets describing Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine with such language as "Putin's war" and "geopolitical conflict," which left him "shocked."

Eristavi said he has been studying the war in Ukraine for a decade since Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, noting that that similar incidents had happened several times in history.

Contexts like these call for "specific language," he said.

"The first, actual newsroom with global English (language) coverage, who reached out to me to speak about these issues in the language that we as the Ukrainians would describe it in, the terminology that we would use, was CNA," Eristavi said.

"This was the first English-language (media outlet) that reached out and said, "Let's talk about colonialism. Let's talk about imperialism (and) what it means. Let's talk about differences that we have here between Taiwan and Ukraine," he said.

For example, he argued that only addressing Russia or China by their names without pointing out that they are "colonial empires," would not be doing audiences "the full service."

Eristavi said he wanted to take the opportunity to call on newsrooms in the West, especially in former imperialist countries, to use the language communities that have suffered a similar fate as Ukraine would use.

"As long as we don't use this language, we don't name the names, we don't name the abuser," he said.

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