Soon, lie-detecting system for social media

Johannesburg: Researchers from five European universities are reportedly working on a system that could help detect rumours on social media by identifying whether information was accurate.

Led by Sheffield University, the researchers have been working on an automatic lie-detecting system, which is hoped would allow governments, emergency services, media and the private sector to respond more accurately to seemingly incorrect information. According to a website, the three-year, EU-funded project, PHEME, is an attempt to filter out factual information from the ill-informed comments that spread on Twitter and Facebook. Project leaders said that social networks were rife with lies and deception and such incorrect messages could have far-reaching consequences. The report said that the project aims to identify four types of information - speculation, controversy, misinformation, and disinformation - and model their spread on social networks. The identification would be based on three factors: the information itself (lexical, syntactic and semantic); cross-referencing with trustworthy data sources; and the information`s diffusion.