Investigating Social Influence and Mitigating Disinformation Campaigns in Non-English Social Media

RAPID: “The project team will be studying how cyber-attacks and communication in this online world are correlated with offline protests, violence, and state action. The project team is collecting a large representative corpus of non-English social media. The team is building tools to identify misinformation and its sources. Part of the data is being annotated for bots, misinformation, and different types of rhetoric. The data will be used to design and optimize models of bot and troll detection for this domain that will be incorporated into browser plug-ins to help users detect problematic information and accounts.

The interdisciplinary project will advance our basic understanding of the role of online communication and offline violence in an understudied cultural setting, adding to the emerging line of work on online behaviors outside Western democracies.”

Commentary:
While NSF funding usually focuses on domestic issues, this project applied the development of algorithms to detect misinformation to non-English social media, which is unusual for NSF grants.

About the award

December 15, 2022 - November 30, 2023

Project information

Academia

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