Research Tools for Understanding Disinformation

Our.News - now in its beta - provides in-sight tools and add-ons that fact check news stories aggregated from across the internet on the spot. Additionally, Our.News provides downloadable apps such as Newstrition, "a free Chrome and Firefox browser extension that provides background information about news publishers, verified by the Freedom Forum Institute, allowing users to check and rate a story’s sources and also rate the stories themselves."

Fact-Checking Any News Story

The Venezuelan Fake News Observatory aims to educate and empower citizens in the face of a reality that is submerged daily in the misinformation produced, among other reasons, by the almost immediate viralization of falsified information that circulates, mainly, on social networks .

Our research work is reflected in various national and international media, as well as our training activities in the country.

A grant from the Knight Foundation to PBS News Hour, the Newstracker project has tasked itself with "developing a tool that combines online news content with engagement data from social media and other sources to help journalists and others better understand the scale, scope and shape of the misinformation problem. The tool will enable content analysis by gathering data about what is being written, by whom, where it is distributed, and the size of the audience consuming it."
(Independently Written)

NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence

The NATO StratCom COE, based in Riga, Latvia, contributes to improved strategic communications capabilities within the Alliance and Allied nations. Strategic communication is an integral part of the efforts to achieve the Alliance’s political and military objectives, thus it is increasingly important that the Alliance communicates in an appropriate, timely, accurate and responsive manner on its evolving roles, objectives and missions.

This system shows the most shared image, video, audio, messaging, and URLs content across over 300 WhatsApp public groups daily. Such groups are open groups, accessible through invitation links that are published on websites as well as on various social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In this way, the system views which images, memes and news are more frequent in the chats of the Brazilians. We hope that this system will make all information shared by Brazilians in public WhatsApp groups more transparent.

(Copied from website)

Disinformation, misinformation, and “fake news” are longstanding phenomena that, in the wake of the digital revolution, have become newly politicized and consequential. Citizens around the world have instant access to a vast variety of information – some of which is purposely misleading or manufactured for political ends. The known uses of disinformation include coordinated campaigns aimed at influencing elections and undermining democratic processes. In response to these developments, new research on mis- and disinformation is rapidly emerging from a range of academic disciplines.

The Media Manipulation Initative takes a sociotechnical approach to understanding the social, political, and economic incentives to game information systems, websites, platforms, and search engines—especially in cases where the attackers intend to destabilize democratic, social, and economic institutions. Through empirical research, they identify the unintended consequences of socio-technical systems and track attempts to locate and address threats, with an eye towards increasing organizational capacity across fields, so that action can be taken as problems emerge.

MarvelousAI is an early stage startup founded by tech industry veterans. We are building an augmented analytics platform to provide actionable insights regarding online narratives. Our “Cyborg” intelligence methodology detects narratives and fine-grained emotional content, combining the power of human-in-the-loop learning with the latest in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine learning.

In video veritas, if we divert the old Latin saying: In video, there is truth! The digital media revolution and the convergence of social media with broadband wired and wireless connectivity are bringing breaking news to online video platforms; and, news organisations delivering information by Web streams and TV broadcast often rely on user-generated recordings of breaking and developing news events shared by social media to illustrate the story. However, in video there is also deception.

Hoaxy is a tool that visualizes the spread of articles online. Articles can be found on Twitter, or in a corpus of claims and related fact checking.

(Copied from website)