David Camacho

Disinformation, a general concept that we can use to encompass false information such as fake news, hoaxes, rumours, or propaganda, has become one of the major problems of democratic societies. This type of information has a deep impact on critical issues such as the economy, politics, and health, among others. Specifically, and as has been extensively studied in recent years, movements such as the anti-vaccine movement represent a clear threat to public health, the QAnon conspiracy or the Pizzagate events in Washington, or interference by third parties in electoral processes such as in the US or the UK (Brexit), have also been driven by the dissemination of false information. These, and other events, are some of the reasons why the interest in understanding and countering disinformation has grown so fast. This talk will give a brief introduction to some Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques, such as Deep Learning, Transformers, or Natural Language Processing that are currently being used to counteract this type of toxic information. This talk will briefly present the Facter-check architecture, a solution based on Deep Learning (under Transformers technology) and NLP, which try to be a useful tool to detect and combat this phenomenon, some of its main features will be shown, as well as some of the latest results obtained. Finally, some of the main problems and challenges (current and future) of this interesting research area will be described.