Technology-Enabled Disinformation: Summary, Lessons, and Recommendations.

Technology is increasingly used -- unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) -- to spread false information at scale, with potentially broad-reaching societal effects. For example, technology enables increasingly realistic false images and videos, and hyper-personal targeting means different people may see different versions of reality. This report is the culmination of a PhD-level special topics course (this https URL) in Computer Science u0026 Engineering at the University of Washingtonu0027s Paul G. Allen School in the fall of 2018. The goals of this course were to study (1) how technologies and todayu0027s technical platforms enable and support the creation and spread of such mis- and disinformation, as well as (2) how technical approaches could be used to mitigate these issues. In this report, we summarize the space of technology-enabled mis- and disinformation based on our investigations, and then surface our lessons and recommendations for technologists, researchers, platform designers, policymakers, and users.