In January, United States Institute of Peace, or USIP, released a report titled "Syria's Socially Mediated Civil War." The report was a culmination of the efforts of a team of scholars from George Washington University and American University, who followed and analyzed what the social media did during the protracted conflict in Syria. It was found that social media created a dangerous illusion of a flow of unmediated information. In other words, social media may not be the raw unadulterated source of information it appears to be.
" Those who follow YouTube videos, Syrian Twitter accounts, or Facebook postings may believe that they are receiving an accurate and comprehensive account of the conflict. But these flows are carefully curated by networks of activists and designed to craft particular narratives," the report said. It suggested that these networks could be as powerful as television producers or op-ed page editors, influencing the opinions of their readers to a large extent.
This kind of elaborate deception is typically difficult for an average user to spot and one has to just take online information with a pinch of salt. But when it comes down to truths versus untruths, social media users can certainly benefit from a system that could at least separate fact from fiction. Such a system could expose false rumors before they mislead a large number of people. A new EU-funded project named Pheme wants to create a system to do just that.
Under the project, a system will categorize sources to identify their authority - news outlets, individual journalists, experts, potential eye witnesses members of the public or more importantly, in my opinion, automated 'bots'.
The system will search for other sources that can corroborate or deny a story, and chart the growth of conversations on social networks. Then this data is combined to assess whether the information is true or false. A statement from Sheffield University, one of the partners involved in Pheme, says the results of the assessment will be displayed to the user on a visual dashboard. If this feature sees the light of day, social media accounts which spread false rumors can be identified with ease, and users can be alerted that they are reading or sharing wrong information.
Pheme, a three-year project, is a collaboration between five universities - Sheffield, Warwick, King's College London, Saarland in Germany and MODUL University Vienna in Austria - and four companies - ATOS in Spain, iHub in Kenya, Ontotext in Bulgaria and swissinfo.ch
The project is named after the Greek mythological figure Pheme, who is said to have been a "tremendous gossip."
The project classifies online rumors into four types: the first kind is speculation - whether interest rates might rise; the second kind is controversy; the third misinformation; and the fourth disinformation, which is spreading wrong information with malicious intent.
The team of researchers behind the project say they can handle the volume of information and the various types of it; tweets, videos, pictures and blog posts etc., "But it's currently not possible to automatically analyse, in real time, whether a piece of information is true or false and this is what we've now set out to achieve." says lead researcher Dr Kalina Bontcheva, from the Department of Computer Science in University of Sheffield.
The system will be tested in the domains of digital journalism and healthcare throughout the project.
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