Eyeballs and AI power the research into how falsehoods travel online

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/ [login to see] /eyeballs-and-ai-power-the-research-into-how-falsehoods-travel-online
What sorts of lies and falsehoods are circulating on the internet? Taylor Agajanian used her summer job to help answer this question, one post at a time. It often gets squishy.

She reviewed a social media post where someone had shared a news story about vaccines with the comment "Hmmm, that's interesting." Was the person actually saying that the news story was interesting, or insinuating that the story isn't true?

Agajanian read around and between the lines often while working at University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, where she reviewed social media posts and recorded misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

As the midterm election approaches, researchers and private sector firms are racing to track false claims about everything from ballot harvesting to voting machine conspiracies. But the field is still in its infancy even as the threats to the democratic process posed by viral lies loom. Getting a sense of which falsehoods people online talk about might sound like a straightforward exercise, but it isn't.

"The broader question is, can anyone ever know what everybody is saying?" says Welton Chang, CEO of Pyrra, a startup that tracks smaller social media platforms. (NPR has used Pyrra's data in several stories.)