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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Co-Inform (Co-Creating Misinformation-Resilient Societies)

Teaser

The negative impact of misinformation on society has been painfully felt and witnessed in many countries around the world, and social media has almost always been the most effective distribution channel of such information. Social media has become a major channel for sharing...

Summary

The negative impact of misinformation on society has been painfully felt and witnessed in many countries around the world, and social media has almost always been the most effective distribution channel of such information. Social media has become a major channel for sharing of misinformation, thus greatly influencing public perception towards various current issues and policies. People are often unable to easily verify the truthfulness of the news posts they receive, and tend to share invalidated information to support their beliefs. Furthermore, people in social media tend to cluster with like-minded people in what is often referred to as echo chambers, thus severely limiting their exposure to different viewpoints, and establishing a strong confirmation bias. Corrective information is becoming increasingly available from numerous fact checking organisations, yet they often prove ineffective in seizing the spread and impact of misinformation on people’s perceptions. And finally, policymakers often struggle to monitor the high velocity of misinformation on social media, and the rapid evolution of relevant public opinion and perceptions. Policymakers are therefore regularly facing complex challenges in monitoring such dynamics, and in collecting evidence to support their relevant policy and decision-making processes.

Co-Inform aims to engage with participants to understand their needs, and to empower individuals and societies with co-created policies and technologies to automatically detect misinformation, to raise their awareness to misinformation, to inform them on how this misinformation is being perceived by their societies and fellow citizens, and to draw their attention towards corrective information. Additionally, Co-Inform will provide policymakers with intelligence about misinformation and their spread across societies, to support them in the creation of more informed policies, which by definition will better fit and benefit affected societies. The project will also benefit society and citizens by enabling journalists and fact-checking NGOs to monitor social media and to expose misinforming content and sources more rapidly and effectively.

Co-Inform is about empowering citizens, journalists, and policymakers with co-created socio-technical solutions, to increase resilience to misinformation, and to generate more informed behaviours and policies. The aim of Co-Inform is to co-create these solutions, with citizens, journalists, and policymakers, for (a) detecting and combating a variety of misinforming posts and articles on social media, (b) supporting, persuading, and nourishing misinformation-resilient behaviour, (c) bridging between the public on social media, external fact checking journalists, and policymakers, (d) understanding and predicting which misinforming news and content are likely to spread across which parts of the network and demographic sectors, (e) infiltrating echo-chambers on social media, to expose confirmation-biased networks to different perceptions and corrective information, and (f) providing policymakers with advanced misinformation analysis to support their policy making process and validation.
Furthermore, the objectives of the project are inherently multi-national, because they aim at developing efficient multilingual social data analytics tools and services, tailored specifically to the needs of detecting, analysing, and responding to misinformation that are influencing public perception. In order to achieve this goal, input from diverse areas and world-leading expertise in all the areas listed above is needed. The project’s technologies, including the Co-Inform platform, will be open to all online users and therefore will involve a diversity of European stakeholders. This provides a unique opportunity to create an open, pan-European misinformation resilience platform as well as to facilitate its adoption and extension across European borders.

Work performed

The Pilots will be the testbeds for the Co-Inform platform. In Sweden, Greece and Austria, users from the three categories of stakeholders (journalists, policy-makers and social media users) will be able to use the misinformation detection technology embedded in those platforms. Advanced analysis methods will be developed to detect misinformation, and to predict its spread based on network topology and demographics. The Co-Inform platform will be open-source, freely-available, and will consist of a browser plugin to raise citizens’ awareness and resilience to misinformation, and a dashboard for policymakers and fact checking journalists. It will aim to offer advanced analytics and evidence on digital misinformation and related policies. Co-Inform platform will enable citizens to read and respond to comments with countering opinions about misinforming articles, and to read, share, and comment on corrective information from fact checking journalists, which will be exposed to citizens more efficiently and strategically.

Co-Inform will target the echo-chamber phenomenon on social media with targeted exposure to perceptions from within and outside the chambers, to raise citizens’ awareness to potential misinformation, which in turn can lead to more informed perceptions and policies. On the other hand, Co-Inform will measure the impact of various informed-behaviour persuasion strategies to support the design of more targeted policies. On a first level, the effectiveness of such policies in persuading a more informed behaviour will be tested, using results from big data analysis, as well as data at a smaller scale, which will provide in-depth insights of the impact of Co-Inform on the three stakeholders’ perceptions and practices, towards certain topics, and their engagement in misinformation-related activities (sharing, commenting, reposting, deleting, etc.).
The second level is on using misinformation analysis in policy generation in general. The assumption is that big data analysis of misinformation offers valued support for policymakers to generate evidence-based policies. Through interaction with local policymakers, the project will integrate the results of the earlier research and explore them by developing and deploying a decision theoretical model for assessing policies and policymaking, and for evaluating Co-Inform countermeasures from quantitative and qualitative data, based on various information sources including stakeholder feedback and risk analyses from the above.

Final results

Co-Inform aims to advance the state of the art in understanding misinformation dynamics by studying how different demographics (particularly age, gender and geographical location) and user behaviour, as well as different topologies and typologies of the social networks influence the spread of misinformation. Based on this understanding, Co-Inform will propose models for accurately predicting misinformation flow. Additionally, methods for detecting bots will also be developed, to capture nodes in the network that are deliberately set-up for the purpose of disseminating misinformation. Co-Inform aims to address these issues by measuring perceptions of individuals towards given misinformation content and by using online behaviour analysis methods to categorise and track the behaviour of individuals towards misinformation.

Website & more info

More info: http://coinform.eu/.