Sep 22, 2021 07:00:00

The story of an engineer trusted by the Indonesian government as a 'master of misinformation control'

False information is a country and society

divided has been, even in the actual situation in which innocent people are killed has evolved from that, governments are working to control of misinformation. The Indonesian government also puts full trust in an engineer who is called a 'master of misinformation control', but the 'danger of position' of this engineer has also been pointed out.

How one coder became Indonesia's misinformation guru --Rest of World
https://restofworld.org/2021/drone-emprit/

Ismail Fahmi, who lives in Indonesia, is famous as an 'engineer who reveals false information' in Indonesia. Fami became known in 2016 when Indonesian politician Basuki Prunama blasphemed Islam during a 200,000-person demonstration. ..

After two days of tracking demo-related keywords on social media, Fami discovered that the keyword 'death' began to appear repeatedly. According to Fami's research and analysis, an obituary of two people who had nothing to do with the demonstration on the day of the demonstration was posted on a website called 'PojokSatu.id' and spread on social media through a botnet. It turned out that it was going on. 'It was clear that the information was incorrect,' Fami reported on Facebook.

The person in the photo is Mr. Fami.

The following month, Fami was summoned by Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to find out where the misinformation came from, stating that the government secretly hired millions of Chinese workers. Was done. Fami identified the source news site as he did during the demonstration, and the government immediately blocked the website. From a series of events, Mr. Fami is said to have become famous as 'a person who fights misinformation using data generated by social media mapping tools'.

Mr. Fami is conducting a 'debanking project' that monitors social media as described above and exposes false information using his own software 'Media Kernels', which

is proprietary software, and also provides tools to academic institutions and NGOs for free. It also sells media monitoring services by Media Kernels as a marketing tool for a fee.

'He's a pioneer in this area, and because it's a new area of research using big data analysis, he's in demand both domestically and internationally,' said Ross Tapsell, a researcher at the Australian National University. I am.

Fami names the public media surveillance tool 'Drone Emprit' and separates it from commercial tools sold for commercial purposes. Originally, Mr. Fami said that he created a crawler that collects news from the Indonesian website in the same way as Google from the interest of 'How does Google collect news?' This is said to have become the predecessor of Drone Emprit's most famous 'Social Network Analysis (SNA) Map'. The SNA map visualizes retweets and mentions such as Twitter by spreading them radially from the source. In addition, SNA Map uses machine learning to classify SNS reactions into categories such as joy, trust, fear, anger, expectations, surprises, sadness, and distrust.

Axus Rasheed Naradipa, CEO of NoLimit Indonesia, a technology company that provides media analytics services similar to Media Kernels, said SNA Maps is the most important part of Fami's system, but 'marketing. It's not as competitive as a tool. ' Also, Peter Vincent, CEO of Mapimize, who provides a similar visualization tool, said that although Fami's system visualizes information, the system does not automatically analyze it, and the act of finding patterns is human. Points out what must be done.

Mr. Fami is carrying out a debanking project that exposes false information by visualizing with Drone Emprit, but at the same time, he also provides marketing services to the media for a fee. Among them, there are cases where the client who uses the service sends false information, and it seems that Mr. Fami actually lost the customer because he revealed the false information. There is no doubt that Mr. Fami's role in working with the government is important, but experts have raised concerns about Mr. Fami's ability to control the target of uncovering misinformation at the will of the government. I am. This is because Mr. Fami is in a state of balance on the border of interests.

According to Fami, Drone Emprit's motto is 'do not claim neutrality, but claim the truth.' 'I'm a data professional. I'll show you the data. I'm not neutral and I can't be neutral because I have to be on the side of the data. But I'm trying to tell you what it is. It's true. It's about being honest. I'm trying to be honest, 'Fami said.