SFU's Maite Taboada harnessing Big Data to combat fake news

Social media has changed the way people interact with each other in the sharing of information, personal messages, and opinions about current events, personal situations and experiences.

Objectivity suddenly became difficult to pinpoint with information being spread at such a rapid and uncontrollable pace online. Sharing news has become so frictionless that it makes it easy to forgo a critical lens when we scroll through our social feeds.

Reading the comments section doesn’t help either, as it is often filled with abuse, trolling, harassment, racism, and misogyny, effectively discouraging constructive discussions.

As companies and their teams of coders, engineers and data scientists scramble to fix these problems, a solution may exist in an unlikely place.

Inside the Discourse Processing Lab, Maite Taboada, professor of Linguistics at SFU, is harnessing the power of big data to make social media and online discussion platforms a better and more reliable place for communication.

Her research is at the intersection of linguistics, computational linguistics and data science.

Full story.