Text-mining software will help researchers fight Covid-19 fallacies, says Commission evidence service
The Joint Research Centre is making two of its artificial intelligence tools available to researchers fighting fake news as part of a wider European Commission pushback against Covid-19 disinformation.
The JRC, the Commission’s evidence service, says its open-source, text-mining software will “automatically identify and monitor disinformation, from flagging fake news to tracking dodgy sources”. The ‘Misinfo Classer’ and ‘Social Rumours’ tools “can help to keep the facts straight on coronavirus, which is essential to an effective public health response”, it says.
The move came on 10 June, as the Commission announced a broader plan to combat disinformation around the coronavirus pandemic.
Making Commission tools to fight disinformation was one of the moves mooted in the Commission’s broader plan, which also called for strengthened cooperation between public authorities, researchers, fact-checkers and online platforms.