On May 13, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence organised a one day hacking event aimed at coming up with practical methods to detect fake news and biased media online.
Fake news and biased media publishing “alternative facts” has become a problem that internet companies and governments are equally concerned about. Facebook, along with Google, has tried to cut off the financial incentives for fake news purveyors by stopping their advertising networks from being used to sell ads on fake news sites. First Draft News, with partners such as Facebook, Twitter, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed, have launched CrossCheck to combat hoaxes online. Many more civil society projects are already out there, but none of them have solved the problem in its entirety yet. Many of these tools work only with English language and cannot be adopted locally. This is the problem that we will seek to solve.
The aim of this hackathon was to become a place where technology industry and media’s top thinkers seek new ways to preserve the trustworthiness of online media.
We invited coders, statisticians, web designers, and journalists to take part in this hackathon.