Countering the ‘Infodemic’

By CANDICE YACONO

Satyanweshi, a chatbot developed by a team of Indian academics, in association with California-based InfoPost, helps counter misinformation.

In mid-March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to spread in India, a group of academics became concerned with one related aspect. This was, as Hamim Zafar, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, describes, a “major flow of misinformation, which was doing more damage than the disease.” To tackle this “infodemic,” Zafar, along with Swaprava Nath of IIT Kanpur and Tanmoy Chakraborty of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, worked with a few students to develop a chatbot, called Satyanweshi.

Satyanweshi, which means “the seeker of truth” in Sanskrit, is a “truth-checking chatbot, which carefully collects information from various reliable sources and informs whether a piece of news is true or not,” says Zafar.

The principal investigators developed the chatbot because they noticed many types of misinformation circulating on the Internet, which ranged from so-called “cures” for coronavirus to blatant attempts at instigating discord. “For instance, some people or communities were accused of deliberately spreading the disease in a country, while some country was accused of creating the disease as a bio-weapon, etc.,” says Zafar. “Similarly, garlic, lemon water and several other plants or drugs had been proposed as solutions to the disease. Some of these issues, unfortunately, are still visible in social media today.”

The team has partnered with InfoPost for the chatbot. The California-based start-up works in the domain of “personal artificial intelligence,” which allows users to have their news sources checked automatically for credibility whenever they open any article.

Zafar says the developers participated in Samadhan, a hackathon organized by the Ministry of Education of the Government of India, in which they secured the second prize for their concept. “This attracted a lot of attention from various individuals and organizations that were working in this space. InfoPost was one of them,” he says.

The chatbot is also integrated into apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram. On WhatsApp, users can submit a message or question, in several Indian and international languages, in the chat window. Satyanweshi will check multiple fact-checking websites and show results. The service also provides ratings of the articles it offers, including whether their claims are true or false. Additionally, Satyanweshi, whose knowledge base is continuously updated, provides general information regarding coronavirus from sources like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and National Health websites.

For Facebook Messenger, users can open the Satyanweshi Facebook page (www.facebook.com/satyanweshi2020/), and enter the rumor or summary of a news story they had seen, in the Messenger chat window. “From the point of view of users, they just need to enter a few keywords, in any language, or a sentence they got as a forwarded message and are suspicious about,” says Nath. The chatbot takes this query, finds its intent and acts on it, providing links to articles with facts if the forwarded message conveys inaccurate information.

In developing the project, the three faculty members worked with four of their students: Ankur Gupta, Nithya Muttineni, Yash Varun and Prarthana Das. In the future, they hope to further scale up the project. “We are open to discussions with the government, industry, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and other relevant sectors. We are also looking for opportunities for commercializing it,” says Chakraborty.

The team sees the app being used to counter misinformation related to other topics as well. “Fake news, in my opinion, is another pandemic which has no vaccine,” says Nath, who was a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow in 2015-16. His Fulbright-Nehru project at Carnegie Mellon University focused on the challenges in Internet economics. “Efforts like Satyanweshi can be integrated into social networks in future, so that the flow of information comes fact-checked to the users,” he says. “It requires the social media organizations to take initiatives, as it is also claiming lives, property and more. Moreover, the user-friendliness can be extended by incorporating the technology into smart systems used in homes or cars.”

Candice Yacono is a magazine and newspaper writer based in southern California.