The scope of the project “Fact-provisioning and bias estimation tools for public inoculation against disinformation campaigns” is the development of solutions that make relevant information more easily available.
The Project
The project is concerned with the phenomenon of disinformation, i.e. the deliberate presentation of misleading or false information (a subset of which is also called ‘fake news’), and proposes a solution for its mitigation. Information is meant in the sense of the presentation of facts, either contained in news (presentation of facts about current events), or in user statements and opinions, e.g. propagated in social media.
The project output will be automated web tools for assessing report bias and the polarization of news, or information sources, as an indication of “media bias”. The suggested tools are mainly aimed at the general public, i.e. online news readers. The tools will allow the public to have more flexible and objective information and to be aware of the media bias in the news sources they choose for everyday information. In addition, it can help non-profit organizations fighting for more objective news coverage (eg https://fair.org/) to have automated media monitoring tools. They can also help journalists and news agencies by enriching tools for collecting, sorting and analyzing news content, with new solutions to improve the diversity and quality of news coverage. showing them which news topics have not received enough attention, providing them with external data sets to enrich a news article, etc.
The final output of the project will be a news aggregator with modules for:
- Content organization and classification, according to author, topic, location, etc.
- Analyzing and estimating the various forms of reporting bias, e.g. the publication or nonpublication of news items, the selective reporting of items, the rapid or delayed publication of a news item with respect to its first publication, the multiple or singular publication of a news item, etc.
- Discovery of debated topics and polarity of news sources
- Provision of external evidence from surveys, authoritative sources, and scientific papers for fact checking
