There can be a great difficulty today in identifying sources online. A user may cite information they have seen a video on YouTube or read a news story on the Internet or a post on Facebook, without having further investigated what the source of this content is. This tendency to homogenize content to identify only the platforms and not the actual producers of the content as sources is a very serious distortion of cultural content quality education.
It should also be noted that in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram…) the users’ pages are all the same: our neighbor has a channel that is visually indistinguishable from that of the U.S. president or the Pope.
It is therefore necessary to re-establish a relationship of source recognition and orientation. In actual fact, within all social media platforms it is possible to identify the source and, through a simple link, go and verify it. There are also risks even of running into fake sources, that is, individuals who create a fake profile associated with a scientist or politician.
Deep Fake technology, which allows the production of fake videos in the guise of political figures, makes the situation particularly critical. Therefore, attention to the identification of Sources is crucial, and it is also important that institutions of digital cultural mediation, such as schools or libraries, return to educating users and recognizing the quality of authors and the quality of publishers and content producers. The mapping, recognition, and distinction of sources themselves is the basic prerequisite for an adequate mode of digital cultural mediation that needs to be re-established.
Transparency of Artificial Intelligence models, which must declare the sources from which they have taken inspiration to develop content, is one of the principles of the AI Act, the regulation issued by the European Union. The issue is therefore now very relevant and the subject of official regulations.
Italiano