EUNOMIA

Traditional social media has rapidly become a dominant, direct and highly effective platform for generating and sharing news at a global scale.

However, as news passes to users, it passes through the hands of actors whose credibility and goals are unknown. It is evident that deliberate misinformation, as exemplified by fake news, is not being tackled effectively by large intermediaries.

How can we improve the credibility, quality, and trustworthiness of social media?

The EUNOMIA project will develop a decentralised, intermediary-free and open-source platform to evaluate the credibility of social media posts.

The EUNOMIA platform will address the challenge of disinformation on social media from three different angles, by:

• Establishing which social media user is the original source of a post
• Identifying how information has spread and/or been modified in an information cascade

Allowing users to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information (users will be able to indicate whether they “trust” or “don’t trust” social media posts)

Trilateral assesses the ethical, legal and data protection issues that need to be considered in the development of the EUNOMIA platform. Trilateral considers the potential social and political risks associated with managing fake news and information verification, and what measures are needed to respect privacy and avoid unwanted negative impact or risks to fundamental rights.

Trilateral’s data science team analyses social media data to identify when and how false information on social media is used to manipulate public opinion or is used in relation to political bias.

Trilateral uses network analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning to gain insights from data extracted via social media APIs (e.g., Twitter, Mastodon), identifying the wider social (e.g., age, gender, nationality) and political challenges involved in determining the trustworthiness of social media.

Trilateral engages technical experts, lawyers, civil servants, privacy advocates, citizens, and human rights experts to co-design the EUNOMIA project and its outputs.

Trilateral works with end-users in semi-structured interviews and participant observation on decentralised and mainstream social media platforms in order to identify the user journeys and the challenges involved in the verification of information on social media.

Trilateral is also hosting virtual and face-to-face meetings with end-users to support open and clear dialogue between the users, developers and pilot evaluators. Trilateral engages users in the planning, execution and evaluation of the EUNOMIA platform pilots, so as to ensure that they are fully represented and supported in the technological development.

Trilateral works on enhancing the project findings by creating a network including journalists, technical experts, lawyers, civil servants, privacy advocates, citizens, and human rights experts to reach out to all relevant stakeholder communities.

Our work aims to facilitate novel collaborations, amplifying EUNOMIA’s results and encouraging the uptake of the EUNOMIA platform to empower users to take active ownership and responsibility of verifying the trustworthiness of social media information.

For more information and updates visit the EUNOMIA project website and follow us on Twitter.