The Limited Utility of Hackathons in Combatting Disinformation

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 is Elizabeth Losh, focussing to begin with on NATO’s 2021 Cybersecurity Challenge for students, which also addressed disinformation as a growing threat, and Elizabeth was a mentor to some of the teams’ involved. The brief for the challenge highlighted the threat to Ukraine, and the role of algorithms in promoting problematic information, but ignored key problematic platforms like VKontakte; instead, platforms were often seen as compliant participants in the process.

The 2022 Cybersecurity Challenge extended this further, and focussed in part also on anti-feminist disinformation; this employed a similarly limited perspective. NATO is not a neutral actor in all of this, of course; it perceives the Internet itself as a zone for command and control, for instance. The Hackathon format itself is also deeply problematic, by privileging computer science solutionism and precluding any opportunities for participatory design with the users affected.

But what can young people do in this space, then? Elizabeth notes the Cybersecurity Youth Apprenticeship Initiative as one example here, and highlights its narrow conceptualisation of roles for young people. At its core, disinformation is not simply a law enforcement issue, but should be viewed through a collective intelligence perspective that draws on a wide variety of materials from all over the Internet. Even Pinterest is used by conspiracy theorists, after all.