AI-powered Fact-checking: Strategic Framing of AI Use for Information Verification

As the scale of mis/disinformation grows across media and social media platforms, public and professional discussion about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for information verification is becoming increasingly common. This chapter explores how six companies working on AI-powered services strategically frame mis/disinformation issues and what sort of moral judgments they use when making diagnostic inferences to find solutions for “information disorder”. Informed by Entman’s framing theory, this study qualitatively analyzes textual data from the websites of AI-powered services for information verification. We find that the companies studied promote services that we identify here as: automated fact-checking, automated credibility assessment, and automated authenticity assessment. Hence, this chapter focuses on the strategic framing of the mis/disinformation problem, along with the solutions promoted by AI-powered services, laying the groundwork for further explorations of how the offered technologies might tackle the problem of spreading fake news.