At Defcon, Teaching Disinformation Campaigns Is Child's Play
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
At this year's r00tz asylum, kids will learn how disinformation campaigns use bots to spread chaos on social media.
But the organizers behind the r00tz Asylum, Defcon's kid-friendly event, say there's no cause for alarm.
The goal isn't to launch a new flurry of hoaxes and chaos on social media for the 2020 US presidential election. It's to teach the next generation of voters about how easily fraud erupts social media and to break down the tools foreign actors use to spread disinformation, r00tz co-founder Nico Sell said.
"The kids are now really interested and want a way to engage," Sell said at this week's Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas. "They hear a lot about fake news out there -- these are things that we want to show them, the exact mechanics of how things really work."
This is the second year that the r00tz Asylum's challenge will be focused on politics, after kid hackers at Defcon 2018 learned how to hack into websites simulating state election results.
This year's challenge is split up into two parts. First, the Voting Village will be teaching kids how to hack simulated campaign finance websites and alter documents. Then the Artificial Intelligence Village will be working with the kids to create a disinformation campaign to spread those forged documents on a simulated social network.
"This is entirely closed course. Nothing, including the bots that the kids write, will be touching anything on the open internet," Win Suen, the AI Village's challenge leader, said.
[...] Each team will be allowed to have three bots. Participants will then be able to see the results changing in real-time on a large screen, as if it were a real disinformation campaign.
While the challenge is a scaled-down version of how disinformation spreads, the organizers believe the lessons are just as important.
"What we're doing is somewhat analogous to kiddie go-karts," Suen said. "Everything is done on a closed course, with extra safety features and adult supervision. The course is also a lot easier and more controlled than anything a driver encounters in the real world, but hopefully kids have fun and learn something too."
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