New research grant to tackle the spread of misinformation

An OU academic is joining forces with a whole range of stakeholders to tackle the spread of misinformation.

Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science at the OU, is part of the Co-Creating Misinformation-Resilient Societies’ (Acronym ‘Co-Inform) project, which has received €4.11M from the European Commission Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges fund.

Co-Inform brings together social scientists, computer scientists, software developers, journalists, policy makers, and citizens, to research and develop a new generation of tools and methodologies to battle online misinformation.

The project will develop methodologies to detect and combat misinforming posts on social media; predict which fake news is most likely to spread, and provide policymakers with advanced misinformation analysis, so that they are aware of it when generating policy.

Professor Alani said: “This project will make available a new generation of tools and methodologies to battle online misinformation. Impact will be on the platforms where misinformation spreads wildly, on the end users who consume and share misinformation, as well as on policy makers.”

The project will run for three years, from April 2018 to March 2021.

The other collaborators are: Stockholm University, Cyprus University of Technology, University of Koblenz, FactCheckNI, Expert System Iberia, International Hellenic University, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Scytl.