Date & Time
Understanding “fake news” in research
About this webinar
This webinar is targeted at beginners in fake news research and students/researchers who are eager to improve their skills in spotting fake news.
Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been also growing research interest in automatically debunking rumors, false claims, and “fake news”. A number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched so far, both manual and automatic, but the whole enterprise remains in a state of crisis: by the time a claim is finally fact-checked, it could have reached millions of users, and the harm caused could hardly be undone. An arguably more promising direction is to focus on fact-checking entire news outlets, which can be done in advance. Then, we could fact-check the news before they were even written: by checking how trustworthy the outlets that published them are.
Dr Nakov will show how this is done in Tanbih, a news aggregator that makes people aware of what they are reading. Tanbih features media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, stance with respect to various claims and topics, as well as audience reach and audience bias in social media.
Another important practical aspect that will be discussed is the use of specific propagandistic techniques that “fake news” articles rely on, e.g., appeal to emotions/prejudice/authority, logical fallacies, etc. Such techniques are essential for achieving the goals that “fake news” pursue, which offers a practical way to recognize them both for human users and for automatic tools.
Key Highlights:
- Understand the various kinds of problems “fake news” pose to our society.
- Learn how to detect websites that spread “fake news” and biased information.
- Learn about the propagandistic techniques that “fake news” critically rely on.
