In the latest episode of Democracy’s Future, we hear from students who are learning about political rhetoric, when persuasion veers into disinformation, and how AI can make disinformation even more prevalent heading into the fall elections.
WGLT and The Vidette stopped by Joseph Zompetti's graduate-level class in the School of Communication at Illinois State University to hear what news media students consume and how good do they think they are catching disinformation.
Hannah Delorto is a first-year communication studies grad student from Frankfort, south of Chicago. She said she looks for social media posts that use extreme language and emotion as a means of persuasion when looking for misinformation online.
“What rings the alarm for me is when something is appearing too extreme, too crazy to be true, and then I have to do more research into that,” Delorto said.
Miriam Wollf, a first-year grad student from Bunker Hill in southern Illinois, says she's especially concerned about how AI could sow disinformation in the upcoming election.
“There are malicious agents out there creating these deepfakes whether it be of Trump or Biden or other prominent political figures that people will recognize right away in this very hyper-realistic way that people will believe is true,” Wolff said. “It alters the way we interpret information.”
Nicole Hackney, a second-year grad student from Bloomington, teaches English at Heyworth High School, where she's been for 12 years.
Hackney explains how they tries to verify the credibility of news sources she sees online.
“It’s hard because of the infiltration of media and social media. I think those two things are so intertwined. We use social media to relax but there’s this news coming in,” Hackney said, adding the lines became blurred even further during the COVID pandemic when many people accessed news through social media and eventually created a feeling of news apathy because they had become inundated by news coverage.
Zompetti said the class serves as a reminder that news consumers should seek out diverse sources of information.
“Even if it’s coming from a political perspective that you disagree with…. that is not automatically a reason to reject it,” he said.
Coming up in future episodes of Democracy's Future, you'll hear how students from both major parties want to expand access to voting on campus, and we’ll hear about one group that's helping women pursue careers in politics and government.
Please give us your feedback on this series and let us know if there are certain issues you'd like us to explore. Email us at news@wglt.org.
