A leading expert in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has called for greater oversight of social media companies in order to tackle the spread of disinformation.
Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control, was addressing a conference on AI in Dublin.
He said that social media companies should not be doing their own content moderation and that this should instead by carried out by third party organisations.
"Stock markets have auditors to make sure that companies are telling the truth about their profits," Professor Russell said.
"The property sector has notaries and title registries and all sorts of extra apparatus to make sure that there's enough truth in the system to ensure people can trust it," he added.
Prof Russell said that social media companies should be compelled to share how their recommender systems work. These are the algorithms that decide what content users see.
"It is absolutely essential that we have access to this information to measure what's going on," he said.
At the moment, he said, there is "fairly clear evidence that those algorithms have learned to promote false information and clickbait style content", leading to "polarisation, isolation and depression" among users.
Today's conference, AI and Society, was held in partnership with the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, UCD Discovery and UCD Digital Policy Centre.
Under the EU's new online safety rules, the Digital Services Act (DSA), social media companies will be obliged to share more information about how their algorithms work.
Ireland will play a leading role in policing the DSA because so many of the tech giants have their European headquarters here.
