Local Chapter Mexico Chapter
Coordinated byMexico ,
Status: Completed
Project Duration: 06 Feb 2022 - 10 Apr 2022
Open Source resources available from this project
Project background.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal a pandora box has been opened around the world, bringing to light campaigns even involving our current Latinamerica leaders manipulating public opinion through social media to win an election. There is a common and simple pattern that includes platforms such as facebook and fake news, where the candidates can build a nefarious narrative for their own benefit. This fact is a growing concern for our democracies, as many of these practices have been widely spread across the region and more people are gaining access to the internet. Thus, it is a necessity to be able to advise the population, and for that we must be able to quickly spot these plots on the net before the damage is irreversible.
The problem.
Once the capacity to somewhat detect irregularities in news activity on the internet is developed, we might be able to counter the disinformation with the help of additional research. As we reduce the time spent in looking for those occurrences, more time can be used in validating the results and uncovering the truth; enabling researchers, journalists, and organizations to help people make an informed decision about whether the public opinion is true or not so that they can identify on their own if someone is trying to manipulate them for a certain political benefit. If this matter isn’t tackled with enough urgency, we might see the rise of a new dark era in Latin-America politics, where many unscrupulous parties and people will manage to gain power and control the lives of many people. Therefore, the results of the project can provide support for both private and public companies in their future analysis and activities. Additionally, researchers and students could use the outcomes for their own research or use it for learning purposes.
Project goals.
- To gather and clean datasets from different newspapers and new outlets in LATAM.
- To predict if there is a political affiliation in a certain topic on the news.
- To compare and determine if there is any irregularity between the. information available respecting specific news in the different news sources.
- To understand and visualize the information patterns from the news by creating a visualization dashboard.
Project plan.
Learning outcomes.
1. How to gather and clean text datasets from the news for data modeling.
2. How to use data visualization tools for further app creation and data reporting.
3. How to create a classification model with NLP libraries.
