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Good bots, bad bots and the humans in between

With Covid-19 reducing person-to-person interaction, and elections looming, how online information is managed is a pressing issue. With AI deployed, what are the roles of human moderators and legislation?

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Last week, Facebook's anti-spam rule went haywire, wrongly blocking and flagging as spam a slew of legitimate posts and links, including those with news articles related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The malfunction happened a day after Facebook pledged to fight misinformation on the virus and said it would rely more heavily on content moderation that was based on artificial intelligence (AI).

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on March 26, 2020, with the headline Good bots, bad bots and the humans in between. Subscribe