Dashboard helps people filter out fake social media posts

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media launched a website called FIBers, which stands for “False Information Broadcasters” Index.

“How consistently someone is sharing a news domain or a website that is considered to be low credibility by independent fact checkers that’s consistently getting re-shared by others,” said Matthew DeVerna, an IU Ph.D. student who helped design the website.

It searches for posts that contain links to stories that meet three categories of criteria: low credibility, conspiracy, or pseudoscience.

The ratings are given by an independent third party website.

“We sort them by the number of reshares, and then count up once the number of reshares is lower than that count. That’s sort of the index that they get,” said DeVerna.

The dashboard is updated each month, and as of now, only tracks posts from Facebook and Twitter.

“The only thing we are after here is to try and understand how information is being spread, and educate the public about what we know on how misinformation is spreading.” said DeVerna.