Fight fire with fire: How online tools can help contain fake news

"On the Internet, every day is April Fool's Day." So said ZŽiga Turk, a Slovenian professor, in his May 2018 report "Technology as Enabler of Fake News and a Potential Tool to Combat It". The report, which investigated the role of technology in the spread of fake news, cautioned that "citizens need to become aware that the Internet is a different media environment than TV and newspapers. There are no editors and no gatekeepers."

There is no denying that today, fake news and news headlines very often blur into a confusing kaleidoscope. The news we see in headlines sounds too crazy to be true while reality TV (a fictionalised account at best), seems real to the viewers. As a result, many a times, readers cannot perceive the difference between reality and manipulated content. In such a scenario, how does one combat the spread of wrong or harmful news?

For starters, since fake news uses technology to propagate its spread, it is a good idea to combat it with tools available on the Internet. In a nutshell, fight fire with fire. There are many tools available online that are free and easy to download. Google's Reverse Image Search is one such tool. It helps in tracing a picture's provenance by finding related images from around the web. This can help in identifying if a picture was used earlier on the web or if the same picture is being used in another context.

In May 2018, several Twitter users shared a picture, where it was claimed to be a Lingayat Catholic Church in Karnataka. However, it later emerged to be the church of Lady of Dolours in Dahanu, Maharashtra, posted by a blogger during his visit to Dahanu in 2012. The same picture had been photoshopped and used to perpetuate a potentially incendiary message in 2018.

There are other tools, too, like InVid (to detect manipulated videos), Watch Frame By Frame, YouTube Geo Search, Twitter Advanced Search, and CrowdTangle (helps identify great stories and influencers), among many others. These can be used by readers at the consumption stage to evaluate for themselves whether the news they are reading is fake or not.

A step ahead are the third party fact-checkers and debunking companies that have created platforms to fight the fake news menace at the amplification stage. With fake news or wrong information flooding consumer sites, the hardest step is the speedy detection of fake news. In India, companies like Boom, AltNews, Check4Spam and SM Hoax Slayer use evidence- and context-based analysis to unmask misinformation and help readers to delete or ignore false messages. Using Internet tools, these "truth warriors" rely on the digital footprint of a viral message to determine if the message has any merit or not.

An example of this is the famous child kidnapping video which went viral across Facebook in India in 2016 and purported to show CCTV footage of two motorcycle-borne men kidnapping a little boy in broad daylight. In May 2017, a detailed investigation by BOOM revealed that the video had been mischievously and maliciously edited without its original context or meaning to fuel rumours of abductions in India. Ironically, the original video had been created by an NGO in Pakistan to spread awareness about missing children in Karachi.

However, despite fake news debunking companies, there is still too much information out there and that is where the trouble begins. It is beyond the human realm to sift through this mountainous heap and separate the good from the bad. And that's where Artificial Intelligence comes in. Researchers have realised that the best approach to combat fake news is to focus not on individual stories, but on the news sources themselves. With this, AI can be harnessed to develop a new fake news detecting algorithm that uses machine learning to determine if a source is accurate or maliciously biased. An example of this is that fake news generators often use hyperbole to grab eyeballs. By using keyword analytics that hunt for sensationalistic headlines, AI tools can red flag potential sources even before they make it to the amplification sites like Facebook or Google.

On the Internet, everyday need not be an April Fool's Day. The right tools can stop the tricksters from making fools out of us.

The writer is an author, blogger and journalist