Fact vs Fake: Misinformation on Social Media

Speaker: Dr Mehwish Nasim

Bio: Dr Mehwish Nasim is a Lecturer in computer science at the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University. She is also a visiting scientist at CSIRO’s Data61 and an adjunct at University of Adelaide. She did her PhD in computer science from University of Konstanz, Germany. Dr Nasim is  passionate about applying computer science methods in the broad domain of information warfare. She is particularly interested in ‘social cybersecurity’ that uses computational social science techniques to identify, counter, and assess the impact of communication objectives. She builds methods using approaches from network analysis, data science, machine learning, natural language processing and agent-based simulation while drawing inspiration from social science and psychology. Her work focusses on providing evidence about who is manipulating communication channels including social media (e.g., spreading misinformation), what methods they are using and how such manipulation can be countered. Her other research interests include, decision making in the context of cyber security, health analytics, and designing technology for emergent user markets.

Abstract: It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between fact and fiction on your social media feeds. One of the biggest issues we face is the deliberate spread of false information over platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Because of the properties of those platforms, wrong, or even dangerous, information can end up in the news feeds and in the minds of a lot of people. In this talk Dr. Nasim will discuss a case study related to a hashtag #ArsonEmergency that trended on Twitter and was spreading the false narrative about arson being the cause of bushfires in the summer of 2019/2020 in Australia.