We Know If You’re Lying on Twitter
TWITTER is, lets face it, a place where people pretend their more exciting or more wealthy or more miserable than they really are. They do it to get attention from people they don’t know and repeat the process week-after-week until someone trolls them, and then they actually are miserable… but no-one takes any notice because they’ve been pretending to hate everything and everyone for so long.
With that, some science people have come up with a thing so they can tell whether you’re lying or not with your Tweets. Bad news for those of you who have convinced us all that your life is all cocktails and new trainers.
The lie-detector is called ‘Pheme’ and it will scan tweets from news outlets, individuals and automated ‘bots’ to see if what they’re saying is a crock of crap or not.
This could actually be useful though. If you think about the riots that took place in England in 2011, so many people were telling fibs just to appear like they were in the thick of it or, indeed, had some news to break while the nation’s newsrooms fell on every utterance like gulls at a fishery.
‘Pheme’ is named, aptly enough, after the Greek goddess notorious for spreading rumours. If this doesn’t take off, you can at least learn this new fact and look clever while you’re slagging off Billy Bullshit in the office.
This system aims track and verify information in real time, which could help weeding out the fibbers amongst us.
It would also use a range of indicators to tell the difference between truthful tweets, malicious rumours and harmless boasts, which should give you the opportunity to show some decorum if someone is merely trying to win favour by looking less crap, rather than telling a malicious untruth.
Pheme will trawl through the history and background of users to pinpoint accounts that were created purely to spread lies, which is good news for journalists who are too frequently printing complete horsepiss that they’ve found on Twitter. It would classify online rumours into four different types – speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation.
Or are we lying?
Posted: 14th, March 2014 | In: Reviews, Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
