Agha Ali Raza and Ihsan Ayyub Qazi from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) wins Facebook’s Foundation Integrity Research that solves the problem of misinformation on Facebook.
In February, Facebook asked academic institutions and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) from all over the world to send proposals.
“Our goal is to support independent research that will contribute to the understanding of the phenomena and, in the long term, help us improve our policies, interventions, and tooling,” said Alex Leavitt, Senior Researcher at Facebook.
Raza and Qazi’s research tackles the challenges by measuring the role of prior beliefs and analytical reasoning, and how this impacts the beliefs of internet users.
Raza and Qazi also designed an educational intervention that uses influential public figures to spread awareness about misinformation on the platform.
“We are thrilled to have our research been awarded the grant by Facebook which would serve as a stepping stone for us to take our project forward.
Through our research, we aim to understand how non-textual misinformation (e.g. deepfakes) is perceived by internet users with low digital literacy and the role of pre-conceived notions, and analytical reasoning in shaping the beliefs of such users.
We are hopeful that by the completion of this project, we will be able to make a substantial contribution towards combating the circulation of false and unverified information on the internet,” stated the winning duo.
The social media giant received around 1,000 proposals out of which 25 awardees have been finalised for Facebook’s research and policy teams.
The winners’ will be investigating issues across 42 countries including Canada, Denmark, Pakistan, Turkey, and the UK.
