Fake news warriors now get a 'Fake-O-Meter'

 

The easy to use online tool developed by scientists at the IIIT-Hyderabad helps determine degree of truth in news content on the Internet and social media platforms.

In a fillip to the war on fake news, information scientists at the Information Retrieval and Extraction Lab (iREL), of the International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad (IIIT-H), have developed tools to help publishers and readers alike to easily check the degree of truth in news content on the Internet and social media platforms.

Dubbed the ‘Fake-O-Meter’, the tools are based on computing models that use deep learning methods and natural language processing (NLP), frameworks and are programmed to inherently and continuously learn to identify fake news in real time.

The Fake-O-Meter enables volume processing of content across genres and languages by using past data to ‘teach’ itself to cross check for fake content and also apply the learning to future news from the same domain, Professor Vasudeva Varma, Dean, (Research & Development) IIIT-H, told NewsPlus.

The model can be expanded to detect fake news from domains ranging from politics to finance, public health, celebrity news and practically anything else, added J Ramachandran, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the iREL and Founder CEO of data science company Gramener.

The Fake-O-Meter gains significance given that the volume of fake news is expected to go up in 2019 particularly in countries like with India, Indonesia and sundry other Africa which are going to the polls this year. In fact, some experts say 2019 will be a test year for all the fake news detection tools that were developed in 2018.

Not surprisingly, governments have doubled efforts to strengthen legal frameworks to curb proliferation of fake news. For instance, in India, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has invited comments and suggestions by January 15, on the Draft of “The Information Technology [Intermediary Guidelines (Amendment) Rules] 2018, aimed at reining in fake news on social media platforms.

There are 11 iterations of the Fake-O-Meter on offer from the IIIT-H to detect fake news on politics, health, technology, Chinese on Twitter and the Spanish language apart from Hindi and English. A Hate Meter to determine the extent of hate language used in online content is also available.

As such the Fake-O-Meter provides the degree or possibility of 'fakeness' in a news story through a colour coded display, explained Ramachandran, who has spearheaded the effort to productise the research done by Professor Varma and team and make it amenable to specific use cases.

“Some domains like politics, celebrity news and health news are particularly vulnerable to fake news and as such any news in these domains can be cross checked as long as past references are available in the database,” said Professor Varma.

While it is anybody’s guess as to how much fake news is out there on the Internet, some estimate it at over 60%, a more immediate problem for countries like India in 2019 will be the use of bots to create and proliferate hyper-partisan and patently false content on peer-to-peer platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

It is possible to adapt the Fake-O-Meter to cross check content shared on such peer-to-peer platforms by providing the framework through an external layer either on an App or even in a WhatsApp group where people submit links, he added.

Disclosure

Professor Vasudeva Varma is co-founder NewsPlus (Veooz Labs) which uses cutting-edge ML and NLP technology to ensure its readers get only Real News. NewsPlus uses a mix of propagation detection and source validation algorithms to ensure this.

(This article first appeared on NewsPlus in January 2019)