Social media,
Online Disinformation
and Elections

The past few years have heralded the age of ubiquitous disinformation – aka fake news – which poses serious questions over the role of social media and the internet in modern democratic societies. Topics and examples are abound, ranging from the UK "Brexit" referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, to medical misinformation (such as miraculous cancer cures).

We use large-scale text analysis with the GATE open-source platform (aka AI or more specifically, natural language processing) to gain valuable quantitative insights from large volumes of social media content, and thus, help answer important open questions, for example: