Fight infodemic and fake news by AI-human driven approach

Abstract

Disinformation, commonly referred to fake news, represents a structural threat to the integrity of information ecosystems. The rapid diffusion of misleading and false content has contributed to an “infodemic” characterized by trust erosion, informational overload, and increasing news avoidance. While technological solutions have been proposed to counter these dynamics, their effectiveness remains limited without the integration of human interpretive capabilities. This study investigates the approach and management of fake news through the ecosystems lens, framing digital information environments as value-oriented ecosystems in which interactions among actors, technologies, and institutions shape informational outcomes.Adopting an interpretive and inductive approach, the paper uses a real co-financed R&D project titled “Trinity” as an empirical illustration of a human-machine configuration designed to manage disinformation. The analysis connects ecosystem value dynamics, with observable information phenomena. In this perspective, fake news and news avoidance are interpreted as interconnected manifestations of value co-destruction that undermine trust and reduce the system’s corrective capacity, by reducing the translational gap between theoretical reflections on ecosystem value dynamics and the operational challenges of disinformation management in AI-mediated information environments.The findings suggest that hybrid human-machine interaction models can act as rebalancing mechanisms, combining the scalability of AI-based detection with the contextual judgment and ethical oversight of human actors. Such configurations can drive value co-creation processes by realigning trust, verification, and participation within the ecosystem.

Keywords: Fake News, Value Co-destruction, Service Ecosystems, Human Machine Interaction

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007717