Researchers launch tool to understand spread of fake news (phys.org)
December 21, 2016
The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University has launched a powerful new tool in the fight against fake news.
The tool, called Hoaxy, visualizes how claims in the news—and fact checks of those claims—spread online through social networks. The tool is built upon earlier work at IU led by Filippo Menczer, a professor and director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. Hoaxy is online at http://hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu.
"In the past year, the influence of fake news in the U.S. has grown from a niche concern to a phenomenon with the power to sway public opinion," Menczer said. "We've now even seen examples of fake news inspiring real-life danger, such as the gunman who fired shots in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor in response to false claims of child trafficking."
Previous tools from the observatory at IU include BotOrNot, a system to assess whether the intelligence behind a Twitter account is more likely a person or a computer, and a suite of online tools that allows anyone to analyze the spread of hashtags across social networks.
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more: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-tool-fake-news.html#jCp
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