The menace is everywhere and you can hardly spot it, stop it or punish it.

Synopsis: Every third Friday of the month, The Straits Times gets its US Bureau Chief to analyse the hottest political and trending talking points.

Singapore recently ordered social media platforms to block access to 14 online posts that target the Indian community, such as by suggesting that Singapore was being overrun by Indians.

Investigations showed that the content most likely originated from a platform based in China and was subsequently carried on other platforms and websites, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said in a statement on June 6.

In this episode, US Bureau Chief Bhagyashree Garekar chats with a US-based expert who has studied disinformation, defined as organised and systematic efforts to manipulate people and to transmit false narratives.

Darrell West of the Brookings Institution has carried out extensive research on how technologies such as generative AI can be used to create serious threats to personal safety, race relations and governance.

He is a senior fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation within the Governance Studies programme.

He is the co-author of Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation. It explains how falsehoods spread and what citizens, institutions, and policymakers can do to resist them.

His bottom line? Only you can protect yourself from disinformation.

Highlights (click/tap above):

1:03 Disinformation is more than misinformation

4:12 Where is all the disinformation coming from?

5:08 How Iran beat the US in information war

8:10 Does the US use disinformation as well?

10:12 Who’s at the top of the disinfo game?

13:30 Do disinfo producers ever pay a price?

19:04 Disinformation will get worse ahead of US elections

20:41 Only you can protect you

24:32 Are Gen Z better at detecting fakes?