Tool to understand spread of fake news launched
New website advances effort to reduce harmful impact of news hoaxes in society
Date: December 21, 2016
Source: Indiana University
Summary: The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana
University has launched a powerful new tool in the fight against fake news. The
tool, called Hoaxy, visualizes how claims in the news -- and fact checks of
those claims -- spread online through social networks.
The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana
University has launched a powerful new tool in the fight against fake news.
The tool, called Hoaxy (http://hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu/),
visualizes how claims in the news -- and fact checks of those claims -- spread
online through social networks. The tool is built upon earlier work at IU led
by Filippo Menczer, a professor and director of the Center for Complex Networks
and Systems Research in the IU School of Informatics and Computing.
"In the past year, the influence of fake
news in the U.S. has grown from a niche concern to a phenomenon with the power
to sway public opinion," Menczer said. "We've now even seen examples
of fake news inspiring real-life danger, such as the gunman who fired shots in
a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor in response to false claims of child
trafficking."
Previous tools from the observatory at IU
include BotOrNot, a system to assess whether the intelligence behind a Twitter
account is more likely a person or a computer, and a suite of online tools that
allows anyone to analyze the spread of hashtags across social networks.
In response to the growth of fake news,
several major web services are making changes to curtail the spread of false
information on their platforms. Google and Facebook recently banned the use of
their advertisement services on websites that post fake news, for example.
Facebook also rolled out a system last week through which users can flag
stories they suspect are false, which are then referred to third-party
fact-checkers.
Over the past several months, Menczer and
colleagues were frequently cited as experts on how fake news and misinformation
spread in outlets such as PBS Newshour, Scientific American, The Atlantic,
Reuters, Australian Public Media, NPR and BuzzFeed.
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, a research
scientist at the IU Network Science Institute, coordinated the Hoaxy project
with Menczer. Ciampaglia said a user can now enter a claim into the service's
website and see results that show both incidents of the claim in the media and
attempts to fact-check it by independent organizations such as snopes.com, politifact.com
and factcheck.org. These
results can then be selected to generate a visualization of how the articles
are shared across social media.
The site's search results display headlines
that appeared on sites known to publish inaccurate, unverified or satirical
claims based upon lists compiled and published by reputable news and
fact-checking organizations.
A search of the terms "cancer" and
"cannabis," for example, turns up multiple claims that cannabis has
been found to cure cancer, a statement whose origins have been roundly debunked
by the reputable fact-checking website snopes.com.
A search of social shares of articles that make the claim, however, shows a
clear rise in people sharing the story, with under 10 claims in July rising to
hundreds by December.
Specifically, Ciampaglia said, Hoaxy's
visualizations illustrate both temporal trends and diffusion networks as they
relate to online claims and fact-checks. Temporal trends plot the cumulative
number of Twitter shares over time. Diffusion networks show how claims spread
from person to person. Twitter is currently the only social network tracked by
Hoaxy, and only publicly posted tweets appear in the visualizations.
"Importantly, we do not decide what is
true or false," Menczer said. "Not all claims you can visualize on
Hoaxy are false, nor are we saying that the fact-checkers are 100 percent
correct all of the time. Hoaxy is a tool to observe how unverified stories and
the fact-checking of those stories spread on public social media. It's up to
users to evaluate the evidence about a claim and its rebuttal."
Menczer's interest in fake news began over
seven years ago. In an experiment reported in a paper titled "Social Spam
Detection," he created a website of fake celebrity news clearly marked as
false and promoted the articles on social bookmarking websites, which were
popular at the time. After a month, Menczer was shocked to receive a check
based on ad revenue from the site.
"That early experiment demonstrated the
power of the internet to monetize false information," he said. "I
didn't expect at the time that the problem would reach the level of national
debate."
In the years since the experiment, however,
the volume and influence of fake news have expanded across the web from sources
as disparate as satirical websites, ideologically motived organizations and
Macedonian teenagers working to rake in advertising dollars.
"If we want to stop the growing
influence of fake news in our society, first we need to understand the
mechanisms behind how it spreads," Menczer said. "Tools like Hoaxy
are an important step in the process."
Menczer is also a member of the IU Network
Science Institute, a project partner that contributed support to Hoaxy. Other
researchers on the project were Chengcheng Shao, a visiting doctoral student,
and graduate students Lei Wang and Gregory Maus, all of the IU School of
Informatics and Computing.
An academic paper on the project,
"Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation," is available
online from the Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on
World Wide Web (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2890098).
This research was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation and the J.S. McDonnell Foundation.
Cite
Indiana
University. "Tool to understand spread of fake news launched: New website
advances effort to reduce harmful impact of news hoaxes in society."
ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 December 2016.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161221124612.htm>.
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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