September 8, 2022
For 10 weeks in the summer of 2022, eight students conducted research with ODU’s computer science faculty about disinformation.
By Tiffany Whitfield
Have you heard that deer spread COVID? Have you seen the latest screenshot shared that looks cool but isn’t real?
Fake news like this was the focus of disinformation research conducted by students from across the country at Old Dominion University’s 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science Department’s Research Experiences for Students (REU). Beginning last summer and for the next two years, ODU’s computer science faculty received $324,000 to conduct research toward Graduate Student Research Experiences in Disinformation Detection and Analytics.
For 10 weeks during the summer of 2022, eight students worked with leading computer science faculty on disinformation. Students came from ODU, Christopher Newport University (CNU), Norfolk State University, University of California, Berkeley; University of Virginia; and West Virginia University. For most students in the program, delving into disinformation—and choosing their own research topic—was a new experience.
“The misinformation that spreads on the Internet and social media is not just a nuisance. It causes real harm,” said ODU Assistant Professor Sampath Jayarathna, principal investigator for the NSF grant. “There is a consensus that a significant amount of false or misleading information is intentionally made to confuse, influence, harm, mobilize or demobilize a target audience.”
REU students chose topics that matched the expertise of ODU faculty, and they pursued research projects to advance their skills in STEM fields such as data science, data analytics, information retrieval, applied machine learning, web archiving and social accounting.
For three of REU’s computer science participants – Hailey Bragg, Caleb Bradford and Ethan Landers – this was their first experience doing any kind of formal research. Working one-on-one with ODU experts left an indelible impression on their plans.
Bragg, a rising senior at CNU, worked on a project called “Discovering Information Traces on Instagram.”
“Instagram is understudied compared to Twitter and Facebook because it has more privacy settings,” Bragg said. “We’ve tried to find trends that characterize disinformation campaigns versus posts from health authorities like the CDC.” She found that disinformation campaigns are not well archived by Instagram.
Another side of her research has led her to study the 12 content creators who, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021, are responsible for more than 65% of anti-vaccine content across all platforms. social media.
Bragg’s mentor, Assistant Professor Michele Weigle, has helped her throughout the research process, from weekly meetings to deep dives into Instagram research.
“I was really impressed with all the students and how much interesting work was done over the summer,” Weigle said. “I was excited to see the impact we could have by giving students even a short-term introduction to research and a taste of what graduate school could be like.”
For Bragg, working with her mentor was a great experience.
“I learned a lot from her,” Bragg said. “She’s helped me go from a university mindset, where your mentor knows the answers and you just have to find the solution and check with them, to this research mindset where maybe no one knows the answer and you’re collaborating with your mentors to work together to discover something no one has ever studied.”
Caleb Bradford, a rising computer science major at ODU, researched tweet attributions from screenshots. Screenshots of tweets are found not only on Twitter, but on all social media.
They “are extremely prevalent because it’s one of the only ways to cross the divide between platforms,” Bradford said.
In the program he learned that disinformation is “someone with malicious intent trying to gain something by spreading information on purpose. Tweets can be fabricated or altered very easily, so this project is about, from a screenshot of a tweet -i, how we can verify that it’s a real tweet that can be attributed to that person,” Bradford said. “We’re not focused on whether the tweet is real or not. We are asking whether it was done or not.”
With the help of his mentor, Professor Michael Nelson, Bradford has learned how to fact-check screenshots using the Python programming language.
“There are so many tweets from politicians that are fabricated, whether they’re for satire or not, but a lot of them are definitely intended for misinformation, malicious purposes as well,” Bradford said.
In his research, he has seen misinformation spread like wildfire.
“I’ve seen reputable people share footage of a tweet thinking it’s real, but it’s not,” Bradford said.
Another REU participant, Ethan Landers, is a rising junior in ODU’s Department of Computer Science. His summer research focused on an evaluation of scientific claims verification models.
“Essentially, what it means is that there is an emphasis on automating the labeling of scientific claims in general whether they contain misinformation or not,” Landers said.
Since the pandemic, many models have been created to detect misinformation about COVID claims. Patterns provide a true or false label and an abstract rationale that protects the label.
“The goal of my project was to be able to test these models with more generalized scientific claims and see how effective they are at detecting scientific fake news related to COVID,” said Landers. “We want to hopefully be able to see if these patterns can reveal generalized clues.”
Most importantly, he has learned that “disinformation is the evil intention, the intentional spreading of false information to gain some kind of advantage and also to influence people in a certain way, in favor of oneself or some party.”
He believes it is spreading rapidly.
“It’s great that this program exists just to conduct further research on this topic and hopefully find ways to prevent it,” Landers said.
Working alongside Jian Wu, assistant professor and co-principal investigator for REU, has been a game changer for Landers. He is an online student, and that was it his first time not only doing research of this magnitude, but being on campus and fully interacting with his colleagues, graduate students, and computer science faculty.
Working one-on-one with global experts here at ODU has changed some students’ plans. After Bragg graduates from CNU in the spring of 2023, she plans to earn a master’s degree at ODU. Bradford has been offered a position as a research assistant with Professor Nelson.
“I am amazed that the students and mentors produced impressive projects during the nine intensive weeks,” said Assistant Professor Wu. “I could see that they both put a lot of effort into making this program effective and fruitful.”
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