September 27, 2023

People are increasingly spending time on their smartphones. Accordingly, the investigators in the project titled ‘Artificial Intelligence, Disinformation, and the Public Good’, Assistant Professors Taberez Neyazi and Subhayan Mukerjee (NUS Communications and New Media), expect that most people would be heavily reliant on their mobile devices to gather information about the world around them through the internet.

However, the way people consume information online is not completely random. Algorithms and artificial intelligence determine the information people read when they do online searches, much like how algorithms curate the information people see and watch on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of general information consumption on the internet is mediated through search engines. One of the most popular search engines in use today, Google, celebrates its birthday on 27 September.

In this vein, Neyazi and Mukerjee’s project seeks to understand how people use their mobile devices to search for information online, focusing on Singapore and its neighbours. They look at the sources from which internet users get their information, how this information is sorted and recommended by algorithms, and whether people can identify false information. Neyazi and Mukerjee study this through analyses of three topics: vaccination, haze and smog, and climate change. They argue that this has implications for how governments can communicate crucial information to its citizens.

Neyazi and Mukerjee believe that Singapore is the ideal locale for this study. As a country with a high rate of technological adoption, it is perhaps exposed to algorithmic sorting of online information earlier and more deeply than other places. It is also highly reliant on both internal and external resources, making issues of global and international importance palpable and examinable. Finally, they believe that insights from Singapore’s environment of governance and policy in the online space may pave the way for other countries to follow in terms of regulation and public service communication.