News Story
OU Receives Grant to Combat False COVID-19 Information
Kiran Parmar, Friday 3 Apr 2020![](https://blog.kmi.open.ac.uk/kmiblg-data/uploads/2024/02/Harith_alani_02766-2-300x263.jpg)
KMi’s Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and leader of the Social Data Science group, has received a grant of €393,000 from a European Union (EU) emergency fund to track the spread of misinformation about coronavirus (COVID-19) on social media platforms.
Harith and his team will track the extent of misinformation about COVID-19 in social media content so that it can be brought to the attention of policymakers and be used to alert social media users of the extent to which they are spreading false information.
The team have begun work on the three-year project where they will use automated algorithms to trawl COVID-19 content on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit, and check it against registered fact checkers. Read More in OU News.
The project has generated a lot of media interest including from The Express and BBC.
Related Links:
Connected
![](http://kmi.open.ac.uk/images/projects/covid-research.png)
COVID-19 Research
A view of our labs response to the pandemic
![](http://kmi.open.ac.uk/images/projects/trivalent.png)
TRIVALENT
EU H2020 project to develop advanced method for detecting and measuring violent radicalisation behaviour on social media.
![](http://kmi.open.ac.uk/images/projects/wegov.gif)
WeGov
Where eGovernment meets the eSociety
Latest News
Barclay’s Eagle Lab offers support to two KMiers to build their digital product
Alexander Mikroyannidis presents SAGE-RAI at the 2024 Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference
Empowering Innovation: Highlights from GenAI & Amazon Bedrock Immersion Day at KMi
KMi Researchers Make Significant Contributions at ESWC 2024 Conference