Rumor Mill 2.0
Barack Obama was not born in the USA! Or was he? Social networks are rife with lies and deception, half-truths and myths. But irrespective of whether a story is fact or fake, its rapid spread can have unexpected and far-reaching consequences. This explains the intense media interest sparked by PHEME, our new research project to assess the truthfulness of stories that go viral on social media platforms (see sidebar).
The context of a story is an important factor to consider when assessing its veracity. Word Trees, the Feature of the Month and part of the January release (2013-12.1), help to understand the immediate context of a phrase.
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Fact of Fake?
Lie Detector for Social Media | Automatic Assessment of Social Media Veracity. Volume, variety and velocity are the three ‘Vs’ of big data analysis. The PHEME project will focus on the fourth ‘V’: the veracity of the acquired knowledge. Information diffusion models and novel visual tools embedded in the webLyzard dashboard will help to identify and track four types of dubious truths or rumors: speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation.
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Visualization
Word Tree | Feature of the Month. New visual tool to facilitate the rapid exploration of search results, and to observe how language is being used surrounding a certain brand or product. The tree structure helps to spot repetition in contextual phrases that either precede or follow the search term. Different font sizes indicate the frequency of phrases, while connecting lines between the nodes of the graph-based display highlight the most common sentence structures.
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