Yep, they are, and we aint fibbing.
Some would say that if you took half truths, rumours and outright lies off Twitter, there wouldn’t be much left but we couldn’t possibly agree. Twitter, despite its loose relationship with hard facts, is still the best and most immediate way to get news these days, you just have to know what to ignore and what to take accept as gospel.
Now researchers are attempting to make that process a bit easier by introducing something called Pheme. According to the Metro, a group of researchers want to build a tool to check a tweets veracity, as well as weeding out accounts that constantly tweet lies.
The EU-funded project will categorise tweets into four different groups, in real-time; speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation. The idea is to stop tweets that could cause distress or unrest from being tweeted around the world in an instant.
It is projected that Pheme would be used by the emergency services or journalists to sort out the truth from the fiction and respond accordingly to either quash false tales or confirm and respond to real threats.
Whether Pheme would ever be released for the rest of us to find out if Wayne Rooney is or isn’t going to leave Manchester United remains unclear, but we bloody hope so.
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