Seminar
As social media become major channels for the diffusion of news and information, it is critical to understand how the complex interplay between cognitive, social, and algorithmic biases triggered by our reliance on online social networks makes us vulnerable to manipulation and disinformation. Dr. Filippo Menczer, Luddy Distinguished Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, overviews ongoing network analytics, modeling, and machine learning efforts to study the viral spread of misinformation and to develop tools for countering the online manipulation of opinions.
Demos
Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering PhD students Matthew Deverna, Kaicheng (Kevin) Yang, and Christopher Torres-Lugo followed the talk with demonstrations of three analytic tools developed in their lab: Covaxxy, Botometer, and Hoaxy. Covaxxy is a dashboard that allows everyone to visualize the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine adoption and online (mis)information on Twitter. Botometer is a machine-learning-based social bot detection tool. Hoaxy visualizes the spread of articles online. Articles can be found on Twitter, or in a corpus of claims and related fact checking. Together, these tools can detect, represent, and examine how information spreads on social media.