Faux & Friends

Faux and Friends is a Shiny web app designed to help users easily check whether a certain Twitter handle has been spreading fake news and/or other forms of misinformation about Covid-19. Since the start of the pandemic, rumors about the virus have spread like wildfire through social media sites. The rampant politicization of the pandemic has only exacerbated this problem. We wanted to build something that might help people conveniently check whether covid-related tweets from a certain Twitter user have been accurate or not, allowing them to see whether their friends or followers are correctly informed when it comes to the pandemic. We built Faux and Friends around a GLM neural network based classifier, which we trained to detect fake news by feeding it covid-related article titles from both reputable and disreputable news sources. For the reputable sources, we used the rTweet API to pull tweets from professional newspapers like Reuters, AP, and the BBC. The disreputable sources came from the Hoaxy API, a fake news database containing tweets that linked to websites previously flagged for spreading misinformation. Once trained, the classifier was able to give covid-related tweets a trustworthiness rating from 0-1, where anything below 0.5 was essentially fake news. When a user inputs a Twitter handle, Faux and Friends pulls every covid-related tweet from that handle’s timeline, and runs it through the classifier to create a listing of individual tweets showing their status ID and trustworthiness rating. It then creates a few simple visualizations, including a bar chart of the most commonly used words within the tweets, and a scatterplot of every tweet and its trustworthiness rating, which allows users to see at a glance the distribution of trustworthiness ratings across every covid-related tweet in a handle’s timeline. It also visualizes the proportion of real and fake news tweeted by this twitter account, so that the user can make an informed decision on the validity of this account as a source of information. With this tool, it is now possible for anyone to quickly and simply check the amount of covid misinformation a certain twitter user has been spreading through their tweets. Our hope is that this might make it easier for people to make decisions about whether to openly trust a friend’s information about covid by seeing whether that friends’ tweet history has been accurate or not when it comes to the pandemic. It’s easy to assume that information coming from friendly individuals is accurate, bypassing the usual layers of scrutiny we apply to more foreign sources. With Faux and Friends, you can now get a fast overview of just how accurate your friend’s information might be, solving the problem of unconditional trust without forcing you to fact check individual tweets.