The former US president Donald Trump is well known for his disproportionate use of the expression “fake news” during his four-years mandate. Especially on Twitter, Mr Trump will be recorded as the main politician weaponizing this catch-all expression to undermine media organisations and journalists. Within the WeVerify EU project, we are building social networks analysis […]
Sam Gregory is Program Director of WITNESS, an organisation that works with people who use video to document human rights issues. WITNESS focuses on how people create trustworthy information that can expose abuses and address injustices. How is that connected to deepfakes? Deutsche Welle’s Julia Bayer conducted an interview with the Program Director of witness.org, […]
Here’s an interview conducted by Deutsche Welle’s Julia Bayer with Jane Lytvynenko, senior reporter with Buzzfeed News. Its focus: online mis- and disinformation and the challenge of dealing with synthetic media (aka so-called “deepfakes”). The interview was originally published on the DIGGER project website and conducted in the context of this Google DNI-funded project in […]
In this post, we explain the basics behind our method for calculating video similarity based on audio information.
A common difficulty faced by journalists and fact-checkers – beyond analytics and forensics – is assessing as early as possible the newsworthiness of a potential story to understand the gains of a further investigation. In this blogpost, we use an example of 5G conspiracy content from the UK to show how the Twitter SNA module […]
WeVerify testing has ran from December 2019 and will continue until September 2021. In total, nine test cycles have been scheduled in order to evaluate the tools and single components from a user, i.e. fact checker’s, perspective.
Screenshot of a new Twitter social network analysis module within our verification plugin
Our verification plug-in is being used for debunking disinformation about the coronavirus in numerous countries (USA, France, India, Portugal, Netherlands, Colombia, Ecuador, Mauritius), and languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese) by many fact-checkers and news organizations (e.g. AFP, France24, The Quint, Boom, India Today, L’Express, Canal 1, Volkskrant). It should be noted that […]
In the run-up to the UK 2019 general election, the WeVerify partner University of Sheffield carried out a longitudinal quantitative analysis of abusive tweets targeting Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson. This showed a 200-fold increase in 2019, from across the political spectrum in which doctored tweets, anti-Semitic tropes and accusations of financial duplicity have been […]
In late 2018, in the context of Deutsche Welle’s various verification projects and activities, I talked to Dhruti Shah of the BBC’s User Generated Content and Social Media Hub. Originally intended for internal purposes only and to canvass views of experts in the industry, I decided to make the interview public here and now – […]