On October 4th and 5th, the Conference for Truth and Trust Online had its first edition at the BMA House in London, “to share, discuss, and collaborate on useful technical innovations and research in the space”.

The central theme of the conference, misinformation, has been addressed with a set of sessions, each one with its own perspective:

• • industry: different companies (e.g. Google, Facebook and Microsoft) explained how they are currently working on several aspects: annotation standards easy to use for fact-checkers, integration of fact-checking results in news aggregator (Google News, Microsoft News), and recent advances in automated content analysis for platform moderation;
  • fact-checking, verification and spread: a panel of fact-checkers (FullFact, Chequeado, AfricaCheck, BOOM Live, FactNameh) opened the session with a discussion on their current projects, followed by presentations on verification and spread analysis (from companies e.g. FullFact automated fact-checking and Serelay Verify-at-Capture, or from academia e.g. stance and veracity of Reddit rumours);
  • news and news credibility: this session included works on the relation between credibility and consumption or the approach of BBC to combine technology with media expertise to spot disinformation;
  • stance and extremes: this last session focused on extremes like hate speech or structured aspects of misinformation campaigns;
  • poster sessions: on both days several posters represented topics like credibility and automated content analysis (e.g. Global Disinformation Index, Factmata, NewsScan) and collaborative platforms (e.g. MetaFact, Fact-check Assistant).

@MeAndVan from @FullFact kicking off #TTOCon – a multi disciplinary forum for truth and trust online – #misinformation and #fakenews with @vlachos_nlp and @gbouchar pic.twitter.com/f9OvC8loH3

— James Thorne (@j6mes) October 4, 2019

Co-Inform participated to the Conference with two presentations. We are studying the social and human responses to misinformation and developing tools to help the citizens to maintain an active thinking process while consuming information.

• “Trust in the machine” presented the study done by Tracie Farrell, Lara Piccolo and Serena Coppolino Perfumi on the relationship between the human values and the spread of misinformation. The talk analysed how basic human values (e.g. conformity or universalism) impact the way we interpret information around us, thus stimulating or inhibiting us to share a certain piece of “news”.

• The second presentation described the comparison of existing assessments rating the different factors of credibility (e.g. the factuality provided by fact-checkers and ratings of existing methods). We pointed out the challenges that we are facing while developing the technological solutions, such as how to deal with contrasting signals to credibility.

Attending the conference has been useful to present our current work, but also to reinforce the connections with different groups working in the same field, and stay up to date with the latest research in the area.

For more details, the complete program and proceedings can be found on the website of the conference.