Disinformation

Real-time monitoring vs disinformation launched in Brazil

Camille Elemia

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Real-time monitoring vs disinformation launched in Brazil

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The project, currently only available in Portuguese, combines linguistics, social, and data science in fighting disinformation online

Aos Fatos, a media company in Brazil, launched on Monday, August 10, a real-time monitoring system against disinformation using linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Called Radar Aos Fatos, the pioneer project detects potentially misleading content on social media and determines how such information is amplified. It combines linguistics, social science, and data science in analyzing publications.

For its early version, the program will focus on COVID-19 disinformation on Twitter and Youtube and will analyze an average of 90,000 publications weekly.

Brazil is the second hardest-hit country in the global pandemic after the United States. The South American country has more than 3 million confirmed cases and over 100,000 deaths as of posting.

“In in its 0.1 beta version, Radar Aos Fatos centralizes in just one platform, a database of potentially viral low-quality content about COVID-19 on Twitter and YouTube. It also maps and gathers language patterns with misinformative potential on websites and Google Trends,” the company said in a press statement.

Starting September, Radar Aos Fatos will launch its premium version, wherein customers “can have exclusive access to structured databases that will enable them to produce intelligence regarding the most common topics on disinformation campaigns.”

Radar Aos Fatos aims to create a unique dataset that is capable of telling how a misleading narrative is built in different social networks and to know who amplifies this narrative. It’s a difficult and ambitious project, but extremely necessary,” says product leader and head of innovation Carol Cavaleiro.

Aos Fatos said it would also launch specific monitoring for the elections, which would happen in Brazil in October 2022, and other related topics.

The project won the Google Innovation Challenge in 2019 and received support from the Google News Initiative.

President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies have been accused of spreading wrong and misleading information since his victory in 2018.

Brazil’s Senate recently approved a controversial bill against disinformation – a measure opposed by Bolsonaro, social media platforms, and freedom of speech advocates. – Rappler.com

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Camille Elemia

Camille Elemia is a former multimedia reporter for Rappler. She covered media and disinformation, the Senate, the Office of the President, and politics.