University researchers are working on a system that could stop rumours spreading on social media by identifying whether information is accurate.
Five European universities, led by Sheffield in northern England, are cooperating on a system that could automatically identify whether a rumour originates from a reliable source and can be verified.
The researchers said on Tuesday they hope the system will allow governments, emergency services, media and the private sector to respond more effectively to claims emerging and spreading on social media before they get out of hand.
The three-year, European Union-funded project called PHEME, is an attempt to filter out the nuggets of factual information from the avalanche of ill-informed comment on Twitter and Facebook.
Claims during the 2011 riots in London that the London Eye observation wheel was on fire or that all the animals were let out of London Zoo were given as examples of false rumours that spread rapidly via the internet.
"The problem is that it all happens so fast and we can't quickly sort truth from lies," lead researcher at Sheffield University's Faculty of Engineering, Dr Kalina Bontcheva said.
"This makes it difficult to respond to rumours, for example, for the emergency services to quash a lie in order to keep a situation calm."
The project is trying to identify four types of information -- speculation, controversy, misinformation, and disinformation -- and model their spread on social networks.
It will try to use three factors to establish veracity: the information itself (lexical, syntactic and semantic); cross-referencing with trustworthy data sources; and the information's diffusion.
The results would be displayed to the user on screen.
