Social media is increasingly a part of everyday life enabling citizens to communicate with each other and access the latest news updates. Many European citizens typically access non-European social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) to both access and share the daily news. However, users may not access this news from the original source of information resulting in questions about the credibility, quality, and trustworthiness of the information as it spreads through social media. This is even more challenging with the advent of misinformation, as exemplified by fake news, whereby inaccurate information is deliberately shared on social media.

The primary objective of the EUNOMIA project, therefore, is to assist users in determining the trustworthiness of social media information using an intermediary-free open-source approach. EUNOMIA empowers users to take ownership of the social media disinformation problem by providing a technical platform and software tools enabling users to vote on the trustworthiness of each social media post. The project will address the challenge of disinformation in social media from three different angles: by establishing the original source, identifying how information has changed in an information cascade and helping the user evaluate the trustworthiness of the information.

SYNYO’s role

SYNYO is involved as a research partner in EUNOMIA, identifying user requirements of the different target groups of EUNOMIA, and analysing individual and collective user behaviour in social media. Furthermore, SYNYO is responsible for the analysis of the pilots, evaluating the EUNOMIA solution.