Project description
New interface to protect against fake news
All it takes is just one fake news story going viral for a company, government or personal reputation to be severely damaged. Monitoring is a crucial form of defence against the thousands of online news sources that publish false information. The EU-funded Factmata project will develop algorithms and an intelligent interface to detect and cluster claims, rumours, opinions, arguments and stances in social media, news and blogs. This will help public relations campaign analysts gain insight on how public opinion is shifting on key policy discussions. Not only will this optimise their communication strategy, it will also protect against negative rumours about their clients that can damage their reputation.
Objective
Organisations (governments/brands) face major issues and are finding it increasingly difficult to tackle information warfare and emerging defamation threats on social media. Rumour mongering, false claims, and aggressively toxic opinions online have severe detrimental effects. Many policy and product launches are executed without granular awareness of how they might be received according to what stance the public is taking, and arguments the public is making in relation to a specific product/policy issue. Stock prices can also take a major hit. Many organisations (PR/Financial analysts/Governments/Agencies) use media analysis to monitor mentions of themselves online; however, current social listening and media monitoring tools are limited: they cannot perform sophisticated detection of key arguments and who is making them, and cannot thus identify useful influencers; they offer poor quality sentiment analysis via keyword detection which does not give insight as to the reason for sentiment, nor explain what rumour or claim caused it to change. Factmata aims to solve this challenge through development of an intelligent media analysis system that can detect and cluster claims, rumours, opinions, arguments, and stances in social media, news and blogs using natural language processing. Unlike current solutions which are limited by simple keyword analysis of media to provide tracking around sentiments, our solution provides algorithms and an interface that can detect, cluster and track claims, rumours, opinions, arguments and stances toward key topics (such as medical/clinical topics or political policy related topics). This enables PR campaign analysts to fully understand how public opinion is shifting on key policy discussions and thus optimise PR and social media messaging and also protect against negative rumours about their clients that can damage their reputation, which is a major risk in today’s “fake news” crisis with the rise of bot and troll networks online.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
E1 7PT LONDON
United Kingdom
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.