The Lithuanian „Machine“ fights against fake news

At the end of the summer of 2018, the fight against fake news was launched in Lithuania with an automatic system for finding and revealing fake news, Demaskuok (Debunk.eu).

The Google Digital Innovation Fund and the Lithuanian Delfi’s collaboration has created a structure for revealing fake news. This is a cooperation with Lithuanian media outlets, volunteer fact controllers and Lithuanian administrators, where a technical solution can detect and expose fake news within a few hours.

The cooperation covers the technical discovery of fake news from news portals, the role of false information checking and the rapid rejection of false information in Lithuanian media.

The technical solution monitors approximately 1000 media streams, analyzing roughly 20,000 news items daily in Lithuanian, Russian and English.

The artificial intelligence tracks, based on known narratives, possible false information in a matter of minutes.

The tool automatically detects narratives and other information in stories and categorizes the material. The material is evaluated based on its content, the coverage of the channel and distributions in social media etc.

Lithuanian „elves“ and volunteer fact controllers analyze the news containing the most dangerous narratives (about 2% of the total volume).

News that is found to be spreading false information is transferred to a separate system and journalists in the network receive automatic notification of the detected fake news.

Proved fake news material is published operatively on network media channels, which cover approximately 90% of the Lithuanian audience. The network includes, for example LRT, DELFI, Lrytas.lt, LNK, Žinių radijas, Freedom TV etc.

Automation of the detection of fake news occurred because Lithuania has had to deal with numerous false information attacks over the years and the normal process was too time consuming and complicated, generally based on googling and gut feelings of the analyst.

Debunk.eu aims to extend its monitoring system to other European countries.