Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: An Incident-Response Approach for Empowering Fact-Checkers

事实核查可以有效地应对日益增长的在线错误信息的威胁，因为政治光谱和人口统计学上的人们倾向于相信事实核查人员的可信度判断。然而，分散在不同工具中的手动和劳动密集型实践的管道使得事实检查工作难以扩展。因此，事实核查人员被信息淹没，缺乏有效的传播机制，无法及早有效地抵制错误信息。为了应对这些挑战，该项目结合了人类和计算的互补信息处理优势，以改变事实检查的效率，有效性和规模。该项目可以使事实核查人员及早发现错误信息，优先考虑工作，并统一用于事实核查的各种工具和技术。研究成果可以扩展人类事实检查员的工作，提高社会的信息素养，这可以显着减少暴露于错误信息的人数。该项目借鉴了安全事件响应的核心组件（即，准备、检测、遏制和事件后活动），以从安全分析师的角度和统一的用户体验（UX）来改变当前事实检查实践的临时、耗时和小规模性质。研究方法利用了计算和个性化的力量，同时保留了人类事实检查器在循环中的协同优势。跨学科的社会技术方法涉及事实检查实践的实证研究，数据收集和计算技术的发展，以解决他们的挑战和障碍，以及设计探索新的UI/UX技术，以连接人类和计算。该研究纳入了一个反馈循环，以传播事实核查结果，从而提高其可见性和对暴露于错误信息的最终用户的影响。研究人员正在开发早期预警和检测技术，以减少错误信息生成和事实核查传播之间的时间，并采用优先级和个性化来更有效地使用事实核查资源。研究人员正在与专业的事实核查人员合作，将研究成果转化为真实的世界。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Fact-checking can be effective in countering the growing threat of online misinformation because people across the political spectrum and demographics tend to trust credibility judgments of fact-checkers. However, a pipeline of manual and labor-intensive practices fragmented across disparate tools makes it difficult to scale fact-checking efforts. As a result, fact-checkers are inundated with information and lack effective dissemination mechanisms for countering misinformation early and effectively. To address these challenges, this project combines the complementary information processing strengths of humans and computation to transform the efficiency, effectiveness, and scale of fact-checking. The project can enable fact-checkers to spot misinformation early, prioritize effort, and unify the various tools and techniques used for fact-checking. The research outcomes can scale the work of human fact-checkers and boost information literacy in society, which can significantly reduce the number of people exposed to misinformation.The project draws upon the core components of security incident response (i.e., preparation, detection, containment, and post-incident activity) to transform the ad-hoc, time-consuming, and small-scale nature of current fact-checking practices with a security-analyst perspective and a unified user experience (UX). The research approach leverages the power of computation and personalization while retaining the synergistic advantages of the human fact-checker in the loop. The interdisciplinary sociotechnical approach involves empirical studies of fact-checker practices, collection of data and development of computational techniques to address their challenges and barriers, and design explorations of novel UI/UX techniques to connect humans and computation. The research incorporates a feedback loop to disseminate fact-checking outcomes, thus boosting their visibility and impact on end users exposed to misinformation. The researchers are developing early warning and detection techniques to reduce the time between misinformation generation and fact-check dissemination and are employing prioritization and personalization for more effective and efficient use of fact-checking resources. The researchers are engaging with professional fact-checkers to translate the research outcomes to the real world.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.