Holistic Analysis of Organised Misinformation Activity in Social Networks

Given a scenario of organised intentional misinformation campaigns, often termed as disinformation, we as a society must be aware not only about fake news, but also about the agents that introduce false or misleading information, their supporting media, the nodes they use in the social networks, the propaganda techniques they use, their narratives and their intentions. Therefore, we must address this challenge in a holistic way, considering the different dimensions involved in the spreading of disinformation and bring them together to really identify, characterise and describe the orchestrated disinformation campaigns.

At the message level, we will explore: claim worthiness checking, stance detection and multilingual verified claim retrieval; at the social network level, we will model disinformation propagation and apply social network analysis techniques to identify sources and main players. Then, the challenge is how to integrate both levels. To address this challenge we must be aware about the intentionality of disinformation: agents that create and introduce disinformation in the social media networks carefully select narratives aimed to have a concrete impact such as polarise, destabilise, generate distrust, destroy reputation, etc. This adversarial game has, at the end, benefited and injured agents.

Approach


HAMiSoN goals

Identification

Integrate sources of evidence at message and network level for better identification of organised misinformation campaigns.

Modelling

Analyse the organised diffusion of disinformation and their narratives at social network level. Model the effect of potential mitigation actions.

Demonstrators

Develop demonstration applications and a simulation tool for analysing potential coordinated disinformation campaigns in social networks.

Evaluation

Create evaluation datasets in multiple languages and modalities. Organize shared tasks for competitive evaluation.