How Intelligence Fusion Is Combating Fake News

Successfully protecting your people, assets and reputation relies on effective decision making. Whether you’re planning and preparing for potential threats or responding to a live crisis, the decisions we make to ensure the security of our business operations require a constant feed of data. When this data is inaccurate, unverified or entirely fake, problems start to arise.

So what is fake news and how can we protect our businesses from it?

 

What is fake news?

Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes usually spread via online social media platforms.

 

What threat does fake news pose to businesses?

Businesses can be affected by fake news in a multitude of ways. An estimated 62% of the American population receives the majority of their news from social media – the primary channel for disseminating and spreading fake news. Shared at monumental rates, and becoming increasingly difficult to control, fake news is affecting more and more organisations, regardless of their size or stature.

Businesses are often directly targeted with false stories surrounding their business activity, resulting in damaged reputations and custom. Alternatively security teams and business owners worldwide are responding to fake reports of threats that could impact their assets or endanger their people, ultimately wasting time, losing money and sapping energy.

A recent BBC News Report highlighted the impact fake news was having on the police and military in Nigeria. It was uncovered that a man in the UK was using his Facebook account to spread misinformation and incendiary images to thousands across the African country. The false reports led to a significant increase in violence and contributed to more than a dozen recent killings in Plateau State alone.

Armed police were constantly responding to reports of villages under attack and ethnic violence which turned out to be false – most a consequence of fake news on social media. As a result, police were not only wasting time but overlooking real crimes.

But it isn’t just the authorities that this is affecting. Back in April 2013 a tweet surfaced claiming that there had been an attack on the White House, an explosion had occurred and President Obama was injured. Whilst it was soon proven to be another piece of fake news, within two minutes the stock markets lost over $125 billion in value.

Fake news can appear anywhere on the internet. There are even websites where end-users can directly publish their views or content without fact-checking, editing, or any other kind of content-curation.

And if you’re receiving your intelligence from an automated or algorithm-only based provider, you could be affected by such reports.

 

What are algorithm-based intelligence providers?

Algorithms scrape the internet for real time alerts and information, automatically uploading them to a platform or disseminating them directly to you as a client. Whilst they’re fast, they can be considerably inaccurate.

Some algorithms are mining for particular keywords but just because a news report or social media post contains certain words or phrases doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a real incident. And if it is a report of an incident, who’s to say it’s true?

 

What makes Intelligence Fusion different?

At Intelligence Fusion we don’t believe that the human element of intelligence gathering can be replaced. Every single piece of data that is uploaded to our platform has been moderated by our senior analytical team, who verify each report, ensure the accuracy of the information and then accurately geo-locate it on our map. The incident is then approved and uploaded to our platform for our subscribers or fed to a client’s own platform via an API.

Not only do we have our own algorithms and AI dropping incidents into our moderation area for analysts to validate, but we’re building a worldwide crowdsourcing network too. Opening up our reporting to our crowdsourced network provides us with a whole new level of accuracy, local knowledge and on-the-ground detail. But it can also open us up to fake news and illegitimate sources.

In addition to our human curation, Intelligence Fusion are combating fake news on our platform by implementing a military standard source grading feature. Every single incident source on our threat intelligence platform will be individually graded for credibility and reliability.

Therefore, if a source has reported multiple incidents to us, they’ll accrue an average grading allowing our internal intelligence analysts to develop a leaderboard of their most reliable and credible sources in each town, city or country who we can tap into for more information.

Whilst gradings won’t be visible to our clients, you can be assured that the Intelligence Fusion team are working tirelessly, using innovative new technology and tools, never seen before in the industry, to combat the threat of fake news to you and your business.

 

Find out more about our how we’re transforming the threat intelligence industry through forward-thinking innovation and ground-breaking technology. Book your demo today.