“The signing of a memorandum on countering fakes is an indicator that the Russian IT industry is self-regulating really well and is ahead of the government’s steps in this area,” IT expert Vadim Glushchenko told Vzglyad newspaper. Earlier, representatives of the largest Russian IT companies, media holdings and publications signed a memorandum to combat fakes on the Web.
“Often, state legal regulation does not keep pace with the current agenda in the IT sphere, and then independent initiatives of major industry players come to the fore. I am sure that this agreement will prove its effectiveness, as was the case, for example, with the Anti-Piracy Memorandum,” emphasized Vadim Glushchenko, Director of the Center for Global IT-Cooperation.
According to him, the value of the new memorandum lies in the alliance of companies working directly with information. They know very well what reliable data is and what fakes are. “I think that now the priority direction for them should be the development of principles of how to fact-check and how to label content,” the expert added.
“It is high time for socially responsible companies to take appropriate steps to stop the spread of destructive content and ensure the safety of citizens,” added Vadim Vinogradov, head of the working group on legislation in the field of Internet technologies and digitalization of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.
“In addition, in the today realities, everyone should learn to independently understand the details of fact-checking and receive reliable information on the Web. However, the signing of a new memorandum will make the fact-checking process itself more transparent by developing unified rules in the Russian information field,” Vinogradov concluded.
The signatories of the documents include representatives of TASS, Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Rambler & Co, Interfax, RBC, Rutube, Ura.ru, the Business News Media holding (owns the Vedomosti newspaper), Izvestia, The Bell, ANO “Dialogue” and a number of others.
The goals of signing the memorandum are to systematically combat inaccurate information on the Internet, create a secure information environment, and develop best practices to counter the spread of fakes.
According to Vladimir Gabrielyan, First Deputy General Director of Mail.ru Group, “in the past few years, there has been a tendency when not only the volume of consumed information is growing, but also the number of fake news, fake information that misleads people.”
“For us, as an Internet business, it is important that a person's trust in the Internet environment and trust in the Internet business is maintained, so I would like to note that the fight against inaccurate information, the fight against distorting facts is important not only for society, but it is important also for Internet business,” he stressed.
TASS Digital Development Director Daria Penchilova called on other media to join the initiative and reminded that the agency is already a partner of Yandex.Zen in the field of project information.
“At the same time, we internally develop and accumulate competencies on how to properly check the content, how to verify it,” Penchilova said. Ivan Eremin, chairman of the board of directors of the publishing group Business News Media (publisher of Vedomosti), praised the initiative aimed at self-regulation in the industry.
Andrey Tsyper, executive director for media at Rambler & Co, noted that “the scariest environment for the spread of fakes is school and kindergarten chats, because it’s the hardest to get there and get through, and what happens there is sometimes terrifying”. He stated that it is necessary “to teach those very users, those very mothers who bring their children to schools, to analyze information, to know where and how it can be checked.”
As Rutube CEO Alexey Nazarov noted, the number of fake news in the past six months alone exceeded the volume of the entire last year, and this is not only a threat to Rutube, but also to national security in general.
Alexey Goreslavsky, General Director of the ANO “Dialog”, believes that the main issue is the speed of determining the reliability of information.
Maria Rubtsova, Deputy General Director of the SMI2 news aggregator, noticed the value of the memorandum for news aggregators. “The most difficult thing is for aggregators to isolate fake news, since the news agenda is formed automatically. It seems to us that by combining efforts, we will be able to develop algorithms that will ensure information security and exclude low-quality information from the agenda,” she said.
Among the measures to counter fakes, it is proposed to develop and adopt, on a voluntary basis, general mechanisms and rules for identifying, checking, verifying (fact-checking), refuting and removing inaccurate information. The parties expressed their readiness to take actions to restrict access to fakes within the framework of the developed rules.
https://vz.ru/news/2021/10/8/1123019.html
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