Lisbon, Sept. 24, 2025 (Lusa) - Sofia Pinto, a computer science researcher at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), argues that personalising content can be effective in combating disinformation, especially among younger generations, where traditional mechanisms are proving to be ineffective.
Sofia Pinto has dedicated herself to studying disinformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). She begins by warning that it is increasingly "complicated to distinguish between true and false, because there are so many disinformation actors and because there are social networks that spread misleading narratives very quickly".
From this perspective, the researcher says that "there is a lot of chaos for the general public".
"Many people live in their trenches very happily, and there is less and less ability to listen to the other side, a lack of ability for people to listen and talk to others," which makes it easier to assimilate false or misleading information, she explains.
What's more, the younger generations are very "alienated from the traditional way of checking whether a piece of news is true or false".
A recent Eurobarometer reveals that the vast majority of young Portuguese (81%) believe they have already been exposed to disinformation and fake news, compared to the European average of 76%.
According to this data, social networks such as Instagram and TikTok are major sources of information, with 56% and 33%, respectively, for young Portuguese, and 47% and 39% for young Europeans.
As such, the researcher warns of the need to adapt the current mechanisms to combat disinformation for young people, advocating "personalisation, because the language of today's generations is not the same as that of older generations".
"There's a big leap, they live in a world between reality and many parallel worlds," so it's important to create new ways of reaching these young people, experimenting with new formats and languages, since traditional mechanisms are proving to be ineffective in this area.
However, Sofia Pinto stresses the need to maintain the rigour and credibility of the information transmitted, so as not to misrepresent reality and thus become another agent of disinformation. "There is a very subtle barrier between these two aspects," she says.
Despite the importance that the researcher recognises in AI as a tool that facilitates the fight against disinformation, Sofia Pinto also says that technology has negative impacts, for example, on education, which is why she stresses the importance of media literacy and critical thinking.
"It turns out that students who only use chat and copy the answers that are generated don't acquire a deep thought about that answer; they don't even remember the answer they gave, and some didn't even read it. Assuming they have read it, they don't even memorise it," he explains.
A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals that prolonged use of AI tools can lead to a "cognitive debt," with detrimental consequences for memory, creativity, and critical thinking.
"Although these systems reduce the immediate cognitive load, they can simultaneously diminish critical thinking skills and lead to less involvement in deep analytical processes," a phenomenon that is especially worrying in an educational context, where the development of solid cognitive skills is fundamental, the document states.
The Eurobarometer inquiry was released in February and conducted among 25,863 young people from the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU), including around a thousand Portuguese individuals.
PYR/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
