Talk given to the Sheffield IT research forum in December 2021

1. Filth and Lies: methods and Tools for
Analysing Social Media
Dr. Diana Maynard
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Sheffield

2. GATE http://gate.ac.uk
• Free open-source tool for developing and deployment of Text Mining technology
• 20 years old
• Research team of 12 people
• Established large developer community, both academic & commercial
• Used worldwide by many organisations to build bespoke solutions, e.g. TNA, Press
Association, BBC, NHS, Nesta
• Includes a whole social media analysis toolkit
• Much of our current work focuses on social media analysis

4. GATE Cloud Tools
• You can try various demos of our tools on the GATE Cloud
• http://cloud.gate.ac.uk
• You can process small amounts of text for free
• For larger volumes, you can set up an account and pay for the time you
use
• You can also run all the tools in Google Sheets

5. GATE Cloud

6. Twitter annotation in GATE
polarity = positive

8. Real-time Opinion Monitoring
Trump tweets
vs replies

9. Brexit
analyser
How do people
talk about
Brexit topics?

10. Which parties talked about which topics?
UK economy
Europe
Tax and revenue
NHS
Borders and Immigration
Scotland
Employment
Community and society
Public health
Media and communicationsLabour
Party
Candidate
Labour
Party
MP
Conservative
Party
Candidate
Conservative
Party
MP
UKIP
Candidate
Other
MP
SNP
Candidate
Green
Party
Candidate
Liberal
Democrats
Candidate
SNP
Other

11. 1. Economy
2. Business
3. Health
4. Employment
5. Schools
What topics did Labour talk about?

12. Hate speech towards UK politicians
There was more abuse in 2017 than in 2015
Men got more abuse than women
Conservatives got more than Labour
2017
2015

13. Top abusive words

14. Topics of abuse per party
2017 2019

16. Characterising Abuse Against Women Journalists

18. Understanding the Escalation of Violence

19. Abuse and
Disinformation
● Journalists such as Maria
Ressa and Carole
Cadwalladr get accused
of lying or being a bad
journalist in order to
discredit them
● Those who report on
disinformation get a lot
of abuse

20. WeVerify: Tools for recognizing and understanding
mis- and dis-information
• Fake news debunking
• Matching against known database of known fakes
• Warning on accounts that have been flagged previously
• Image similarity tools
• OCR of memes and images
• Social network and “ampliganda” analysis
• Tools for revealing visual manipulation of images
• Investigating conversations around misinformation – is it believed?
• COVID misinformation topic classifier and exploration

21. Understanding Misinformation

22. How do people respond?

23. Inspection of
responses –
automatic
classification of
response type

24. Challenges Ahead
• Fairness in ML models (particularly relevant to abuse detection)
• How can we detect the real subtleties of speech?
• How do we maintain the balance with freedom of speech and
online safety / integrity?
• How can we work with social media platforms to ensure best
practices?
• Many ethical issues around the use of personal information (e.g.
predicting individual characteristics)
• Ensuring our own mental and physical safety

25. More info
• GATE NLP toolkit http://gate.ac.uk
• GATE Cloud Processing: try out the tools! http://cloud.gate.ac.uk
• GATE Blog https://gate4ugc.blogspot.com/
• Social Media Analysis work https://gate-socmedia.group.shef.ac.uk/
• Our studies of online abuse against journalists:
• The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists
• Maria Ressa: Fighting an Onslaught of Online Violence
• WeVerify project studying misinformation http://weverify.eu
Work supported by Unesco, the UK FCDO, and the European Union/EU under the Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT) theme of the 7th Framework and H2020
Programmes for R&D WeVerify (825297): https://weverify.eu/