India: IIT-Kharagpur develops tech to filter fake news about disasters

By Prachi Verma

Filtering out fake news about disasters on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook is going to get simpler. 

The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur has come up with a solution that uses artificial intelligence to extract critical information from social media platforms that is difficult to obtain manually. This information can be used to determine the authenticity of posts and also pass on data to aid rescue and relief operations. 

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“Our solution can detect fake news and can even alert users in the time of disasters through deep machine learning algorithms,” said Saptarshi Ghosh of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. 

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In addition, the solution helps to glean information that can help victims of disasters. It is estimated that only 2% of tweets have relevant information on disasters while the remaining content is largely conversations, mostly sympathy for victims. 

This is how it works: While one tweets about the situation of victims hit by an earthquake in English or Hindi, a computer programme can read through the empathetic post and send the relevant information to relief operators nearby. 

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