Misinformation gets a powerful foe: Taylor Swift

In the age of generative AI, life imitates art and vice versa all the time. All the lines are becoming blurred. 

So it was perhaps appropriate that the immediate aftermath of the US Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump - in an election closely watched around the world - was dominated by the endorsement of the biggest celebrity on the planet: Taylor Swift.

Her choice of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz was hardly a surprise - she has supported the Democrats before. 

But it was her reasons for making her endorsement public that interested me. She said she’d recently been made aware of fake gen AI images of her apparently endorsing Donald Trump, and that ‘it really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.’ 

There’s no question that gen AI does have the ability to turbo-charge the spread of misinformation. It is already happening. But we can’t let that mean we settle for a status quo where no one trusts anything any more. 

One of the biggest challenges of our time is to make sure the majority of people still feel there are sources of information they can trust. It’s not about telling people what to think. It’s about making sure people have the ability to think for themselves. 

And we believe that while the dizzying pace of technological change is part of this challenge, it’s also an enormous opportunity. Full Fact has been building AI tools for several years, to help fact checkers deal with huge amounts of information at scale. 

Our current suite of tools is being used by 33 organisations in 18 countries and three languages. And there is more in development - including a gen AI tool to identify health misinformation in online videos and rank it by the harm it could cause.

That means technology is part of the solution, and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting. But human beings - all of us - still need to take the lead. 

So, what are we going to do about it?

As it happens, Taylor Swift’s advice to her 283 million followers on Instagram is spot on: ‘do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most… your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.’ 

In other words, critical thinking is more important than ever. Having an ability to separate fact from fiction, and to check sources of information thoroughly, is an essential skill. 

That’s what motivates us at Full Fact. And if Taylor Swift is encouraging it - no matter who she chooses to endorse - who are we to disagree? 

It’s about Context and Caveat. Maybe she could write a song about it. 

(Photo by PEDRO UGARTE / AFP)