Russia practices “disinformation” in political tensions in the Near and Middle East, a region destabilized by the conflict between Hamas and Israel, Microsoft President Brad Smith said from Paris on Saturday. Brad Smith is participating in the Paris Peace Forum, which opened Friday and continues Saturday. He was questioned by France Inter radio about the role of his group, an IT and technology giant, in promoting peace.
Fight against disinformation
He assured that one of the responses of Microsoft and its competitors was to fight against disinformation, in particular by advancing artificial intelligence (AI). “The first (response) is the one that Microsoft and other companies are pursuing, by creating technological tools that facilitate the detection of manipulated, modified, altered content, including through the use of artificial intelligence, whether more easy to detect,” he said.
“Using AI, we can find these different disinformation campaigns,” said Brad Smith. “We are getting very good at identifying a Russian campaign, like when they tried to tell people not to get the Covid vaccine. Or, today, when we see Russian disinformation in the Middle East,” he said. -he explained.
Regulation of technologies and content
“When you think about this kind of fake content, altered content, it’s created, distributed, it’s on the internet. What should technology platforms do? There are three possibilities, I would say,” he said. “We can do nothing. We can delete the content. And you can re-label it and say: you can read this but you have to know that it was modified by someone. There is no societal consensus about what companies should do,” lamented the president of Microsoft.
The regulation of technologies and content on the internet is one of the subjects of the Paris Peace Forum, which brings together around twenty heads of state and government, numerous ministers and leaders of major international institutions.