Full Seminar Details
Dr Grégoire Burel
Knowledge Media Institute
This event took place on Wednesday 31 August 2022 at 11:30
Correcting misconceptions and false beliefs is important for inserting reliable information about COVID-19 into public discourse, but what impact does this have on the continued proliferation of misinforming claims? How can we track their impact over time? What is the best way to inform individuals about the misinformation they share? Using more than 3 years of data collected from Twitter and fact-checking organisations, we discuss the relation between fact-checking and misinformation across topics and demographics. We then proceed to show how the Fact-checking Observatory, a website that generates human-readable weekly reports automatically about the spread of covid-related misinformation and fact-checks can be used for monitoring such information over time. Finally, we analyse early results about the effectiveness of our Twitter bot in reducing individual sharing of misinforming content.
Maven of the Month
We are also inviting top experts in AI and Knowledge Technologies to discuss major socio-technological topics with an audience that comprises both members of the Knowledge Media Institute, as well as the wider staff at The Open University. Differently from our seminar series, these events follow a Q&A format.