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The
Observatory on Social Media’s Toolkit to Combat
Misinformation | | |
Indiana
University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe)
is a research center which studies the role of
media and technology in society. OSoMe unites data
scientists and journalists to investigate how
information and misinformation spread online. It
also provides students, journalists and citizens
with resources, data, and training to identify and
counter attempts to intentionally manipulate
public opinion.
Check
out some of the tools that OSoMe has
created to combat online misinformation:
- Hoaxy:
Hoaxy works to visualize the spread of
information on Twitter. Users can search on
Twitter and visualize results from the past
week, or users can visualize the spread of
claims collected by Hoaxy. Hoaxy visualizes
temporal trends, which plot the cumulative
number of Twitter shares over time and diffusion
networks, which display how claims spread from
person to person. Using the visualizations, a
user can understand how information, and in
turn, misinformation is spread on Twitter.
- Botometer: Botomoeter checks
the activity of a Twitter account through a
machine learning algorithm and gives it a score,
based on how likely the account is to be a bot.
A low score indicates that the account is likely
to be human, while a high score indicates that
the account is likely a bot.
- Fakey:
Fakey is a game that works to teach media
literacy and analyze how people interact with
misinformation. The game shows a simulated news
feed with different articles, some of which come
from legitimate news sources, and others that
come from sites with typically misleading
information, clickbait headlines, conspiracy
theories, and other types of
misinformation.
- BotSlayer: BotSlayer is "an
application that tracks and detects potential
manipulation of information spreading on
Twitter." BotSlayer is an application that a
user downloads on their computer, and allows
users to explore tweets and accounts associated
with suspicious campaigns on Twitter. The tool
works in tandem with Hoaxy, as once you explore
tweets that are potentially spreading
misinformation, you can visualize the data using
Hoaxy.
- EchoDemo: EchoDemo allows
users to visualize how echo chambers emerge from
social media. The tool works as a
simulation that demonstrates how two mechanisms
of social media, influence and
friending/unfriending can lead to polarized
social networks.
- Bot
Electioneering Volume: The Bot
Electioneering Volume (BEV) tool "visualizes the
activity of likely bots on Twitter around the
2018 US midterm election." The tool allows uses
to explore the activity of bots on a daily
basis, and how their activity worked to
influence online discourse about the election.
The tool also shows the topics targeted by
likely bots.
- Trends: The Trends tool
analyzes the volume of tweets with a given
hashtag, URL, or keyword over a given period of
time. This tool allows users to search for a
term and a date, and then the tool visualizes
the number of tweets about the hashtag, URL, or
keyword during a certain period of time.
- Networks: The Network tool
creates an interactive network to show how
information spreads across Twitter. Users can
search the OSoMe archive using a single hashtag
or a list of hashtags over a specific period of
time, and the tool will visualize the data into
an information network.
- CoVaxxy: The CoVaxxy tool
works to visualize the relationship between
COVID-19 vaccine adoption and online
(mis)information. The user can compare maps and
graphs between online discussions and vaccine
adoption, allowing them to understand how the
differences between misinformation spread about
vaccination rates and actual vaccination rates.
Check
out more from OSoMe on Twitter HERE
Authored
by Lianna
Brown | |
|
 We
Hold These Truths is a nonpartisan effort of the
McCain Institute. It does not support or oppose
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Sent: Monday, April 11, 2022
10:26 PM
Subject: The Observatory on
Social Media’s Toolkit to Combat
Misinformation | | | | |
