IIT Kharagpur creates algorithm to identify fake news

To filter out the fake news about the disasters on the social media channel such as Twitter, and Whatsapp is now going to get much simpler.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur has now come up with a solution which uses the AI to extract the critical information from the Social media platforms which is very tough to obtain manually. This information then can be used to determine the authenticity of the posts and also to pass on data to the relief and rescue operations.

At the Chennai floods in 2016, there were some of the rumors that the crocodiles had escaped from the park. IIT’s solution could now easily identify this as fake news by just mapping and analyzing the information from the authorities in the region.

“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.

Ghosh heads the team of developing algorithms for this AI task. As of now, this solution is just limited to only disasters in terms of the simplifying rumors or the fake news. Ghosh revealed that it is capable of providing around 90% accuracy.

“We are developing AI methods to extract specific types of critical and actionable information from social media content posted during disasters such as resource needs, resource availability and information about trapped people,” said Ghosh.

“These web-based systems will utilize the algorithms developed by us and perform tasks like identifying and extracting actionable information, summarising the actionable information,” he said.

IIT Kharagpur along with the Urban Science and Engineering Center at the IIT Bombay has now also submitted a research report proposal to the Department of Technology and Science.

“As part of this project, we wish to focus on emergency situations in urban areas, e.g., the recent floods in Chennai and Mumbai,” Ghosh said.