Datalab Faculty
Emma SpiroCollaborators
Kate Starbird
Robert Mason
Project Description
This research seeks both to understand the patterns and mechanisms of the diffusion of misinformation on social media and to develop algorithms to automatically detect misinformation as events unfold. During natural disasters and other hazard events, individuals increasingly utilize social media to disseminate, search for and curate event-related information. There is great potential for this information to be used by affected communities and emergency responders to enhance situational awareness and improve decision-making, facilitating response activities and potentially saving lives. Yet several challenges remain; one is the generation and propagation of misinformation. Taking a novel and transformative approach, this project aims to utilize the collective intelligence of the crowd – the crowdwork of some social media users who challenge and correct questionable information – to distinguish misinformation and aid in its detection.
Publications
Starbird, K., D. Dailey, O. Mohamed, G. Lee, and Emma S. Spiro. (2018) ``Engage Early, Correct More: How Journalists Participate in False Rumors Online during Crisis Events.'' In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montreal, Canada.
Krafft, P., K. Zhou, I. Edwards, K. Starbird and Emma S. Spiro. (2017) ``Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking.'' In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Denver, Colorado.
Zeng, L., K. Starbird, and Emma S. Spiro. (2016) ``#Unconfirmed: Classifying Rumor Stance in Crisis-Related Social Media Messages.'' In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Poster Paper. Cologne, Germany.
Starbird, K., Emma S. Spiro, I. Edwards, K. Zhou, J. Maddock, and S. Narasimhan. (2016) ``Could this be true? I think so! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring.'' In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, California.
Starbird, Emma S. Spiro, Arif, Chou, Narasimhan, Maddock, Shanahan and Robinson. (2015) “Expressed Uncertainty and Denials as Signals of Online Rumoring.” Collective Intelligence Conference. Santa Clara, California.