Fake news has been a nuisance to the entire world for a long time now, but it is only recently that major sectors like government and all have started to take notice of the gravity of it.
Earlier dismissed as nothing of importance, fake news has proved itself to be dangerous and harmful to the common public.
It has proven that it can not just spread false information, but make wrong candidates win elections, create hysteria among the public and even result in death or worse.
Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular social media platforms have come under serious fire for their role in allegedly spreading or allowing the spread of fake news and why have they not taken more serious steps to curb it.
Read More: Mark Zuckerberg On Fake News: Is It Damage Control After Election Backlash?
But Research Is Being Conducted To Detect Fake News
As per reports, scientists are working on creating a new computer tool which can help in detecting Twitter bots that create and spread fake news.
According to researchers, the main problem which makes stopping the spread of false information difficult is that most of the times, the fake news is combined with a small bit of real information.
This loophole allows the fake news to pass through the cracks of many servers and reach the common public.
The research that is being conducted by scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in the United States, aims to differentiate between the different kinds of fake news and curbing the ones coming from bots.
With a mix of data mining and security, computational fact-checking, and static and dynamic code analysis, this team of researchers will experiment and work to understand how bots interact with news consumption behaviour and effects.
As said by one of the researchers on this team, at the moment it is very difficult to separate an actual human from a bot, so one does not really know whether the one posting that information is a bot or a human and if they have malicious intentions or not.
Bots as per Twitter are computer programme run accounts that will automatically conduct real activity like following accounts, leaving comments on tweets, publishing and forwarding of content and other such normal stuff which would make one believe it is a human operating.
Signing off I would say that, this could be a breakthrough in actually dealing and curbing fake news and strive towards a cleaner internet that is not so filled with malicious bots.
Image Credits: Google Images
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