Description

Oskar Schortz, PhD Student in Education, (University of Cambridge)

Fake news, misinformation and disinformation are being created and circulated online with unprecedented speed and scale. There are concerns that this poses a serious threat to our modern digital societies by skewing public opinion about important issues and maliciously interfering with national election campaigns. Fact-checking is an increasingly vital approach for tackling the rapid spread of false claims online. Specifically, there is an urgent need for automated systems that detect, extract and classify incorrect information in real-time; and linguistic analyses of argument structure, entailment, stance marking, and evidentiality can assist the development of such systems.

For their Fact-Checking Hackathon, the Giving Voice to Digital Democracies project at CRASSH brought together people with expertise in Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology to develop new approaches for tackling the problems posed by fake news, misinformation and disinformation.

The Hackathon took place on 10 January 2020 at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Giving Voice to Digital Democracies is part of the Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at CRASSH, funded by the Humanities and Social Change International Foundation.

#hackathon #factchecking #fakenews