MeVer NetworkX: Network Analysis and Visualization for Tracing Disinformation

Olga Papadopoulou, Themistoklis Makedas, Lazaros Apostolidis, Francesco Poldi, Symeon Papadopoulos and Ioannis Kompatsiaris
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Olga Papadopoulou: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas—CERTH, Information Technologies Institute—ITI, 6th km Harilaou-Thermi, Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Themistoklis Makedas: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas—CERTH, Information Technologies Institute—ITI, 6th km Harilaou-Thermi, Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Lazaros Apostolidis: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas—CERTH, Information Technologies Institute—ITI, 6th km Harilaou-Thermi, Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Francesco Poldi: EU DisinfoLab, Chaussée de Charleroi 79, 1060 Brussels, Belgium
Symeon Papadopoulos: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas—CERTH, Information Technologies Institute—ITI, 6th km Harilaou-Thermi, Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Ioannis Kompatsiaris: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas—CERTH, Information Technologies Institute—ITI, 6th km Harilaou-Thermi, Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece

Future Internet, 2022, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-26

Abstract: The proliferation of online news, especially during the “infodemic” that emerged along with the COVID-19 pandemic, has rapidly increased the risk of and, more importantly, the volume of online misinformation. Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, serve as fertile ground for disseminating misinformation, making the need for tools for analyzing the social web and gaining insights into communities that drive misinformation online vital. We introduce the MeVer NetworkX analysis and visualization tool, which helps users delve into social media conversations, helps users gain insights about how information propagates, and provides intuition about communities formed via interactions. The contributions of our tool lie in easy navigation through a multitude of features that provide helpful insights about the account behaviors and information propagation, provide the support of Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram graphs, and provide the modularity to integrate more platforms. The tool also provides features that highlight suspicious accounts in a graph that a user should investigate further. We collected four Twitter datasets related to COVID-19 disinformation to present the tool’s functionalities and evaluate its effectiveness.

Keywords: social network analysis; network visualization tools; online disinformation; online social networks; journalistic practices; intelligent metadata processing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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