Experts search for ways to stop spread of fake news
NEW YORK: The fight against fake news is not just being waged by Google, Facebook and big media companies. They are joined by academics and data scientists who started work on the subject years before bogus news stories were suspected of helping sway the 2016 US presidential election.
Their work has yielded tools that help track how “alternative facts” spread, and others that let you identify fake stories or block them altogether. Some of these are still baby steps, but they are a key, if largely unsung, part of the effort to curb the spread of fake stories.
The phenomenon first caught the eye of Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, a research scientist at Indiana University, during the Ebola crisis in 2014.
“We started seeing a lot of content that was spreading, completely fabricated claims about importations of Ebola, (such as) entire towns in Texas being under quarantine.
“These claims were created using names of publications that sounded like newspapers. And they were getting a lot of traction on social media,” he said. So, he helped create a tool tracking how unsubstantiated claims spread online.
Another researcher, Tanushree Mitra, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said: “Companies like Facebook and Twitter were not paying much attention.” Now she has created an app with her colleagues to distinguish between fact and fiction in the news.
But other experts say technological solutions such as apps and plug-ins are unlikely to get to the root of the problem.
The real solution, they say, will start in school. The better educated and informed the public is, the more likely they are going to be “asking questions and exploring alternative sources of information”, said Mike Posner, co-director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. – AP