Russia is practicing “disinformation” in political tensions in the Middle East, a region destabilized by the conflict between Hamas and Israel, Microsoft President Brad Smith said in Paris on Saturday.
Mr Smith is taking part in the Paris Peace Forum, which opened on Friday and continues on Saturday. He was interviewed by France Inter radio about the role of his group, an IT and technology giant, in promoting peace.
He assured that one of the responses from Microsoft and its competitors is the fight against disinformation, especially through the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI).
“The first (response) is the one that Microsoft and other companies are pursuing by developing technological tools that facilitate the detection of manipulated, modified and altered content, including through the use of artificial intelligence when they are easier to detect,” said he .
“You can use AI to find these different disinformation campaigns,” Smith said.
“We are getting very good at identifying a Russian campaign, like when they tried to tell people not to get vaccinated against Covid. Or today, when we see Russian disinformation in the Middle East,” he explained.
“If we think about this type of false content, altered content, it is created and distributed, it is on the internet. What should technology platforms do? I would say there are three options,” he said.
“We can not do anything. You can delete the content. And you can mark them again and say: You can read this, but you need to know that someone changed it. “There is no social consensus about what companies should do,” complained the president of Microsoft.
The regulation of technologies and content on the Internet is one of the topics of the Paris Peace Forum, which is attended by around twenty heads of state and government, numerous ministers and heads of major international institutions.