New tool launched to show how fake news spreads

New York: A new tool that shows how fake news and unverified stories spread through social media has been developed by researchers at a US university. The search engine - dubbed - is the latest effort to combat the proliferation of fake news, which proliferated during the US presidential campaign, with one bogus post-Election Day story sparking a real-life event when a gunman fired shots into a Washington DC restaurant.

“It is a very serious problem,” said Filippo Menczer, the director of Indiana University’s Centre for Complex Networks and Systems Research, which launched Hoaxy. Misinformation and propaganda are not new, but Mr Menczer said social media had added a new component, because the information was pre-selected to be in line with people’s own opinions. “Social media makes it more likely that I am more exposed to false information that I am likely to believe,” he added. Hoaxy did not determine whether a story was real, but it showed how it was spread online and showed related fact-checking. The free website -

can be used by reporters, researchers and the public. If a user suspects a story is false they can search it in the website to see how it was spread and to what degree it went viral.

“There is no editorial judgment,” Mr Menczer said. “We don’t look at the claims, or vet them, or say they are true or false.” RNZI