Watch n’ Check: Towards a Social Media Monitoring Tool to Assist Fact-Checking Experts

The era of social media has jeopardized the authenticity of information and the spread of fake news has been a growing phenomenon difficult to control and potentially leading to unexpected and undesired outcomes. Fact-Checking movements and methods have proved to be a fundamental process for revitalizing news broadcasting and consumption, accessing the truthfulness of claims, and giving citizens information to make more conscious political choices. Many automated systems for claims detection and veracity verification have already been developed over the years. These tools often provide valuable results, but they appear as a black box that does not provide transparency on how the output is been elaborated. In this thesis, we present an ongoing work to develop Watch n’ Check, in collaboration with ABC RMIT Fact Check, an Australian Fact-Checking organization. Such a tool is the result of our research on finding the most cost-effective way to integrate data analysis in the fact-checkers daily work, engaging them in the development and giving them a transparent control of the the outcome of the analysis. It allows experts access to a large number of information streams published in real-time on Twitter, allowing efficient identification of trending topics and monitoring the changes in the news propagation dynamics, improving the impartiality in the process of targeting the statements/news to be checked.