Athens-based Fighthoax is a technology company serving deep news analysis to media and businesses worldwide. They offer a seamless way to extract insights from news, centred on bias and source validity. Their service looks to attract and retain more readers by integrating reliable data analysis into journalistic work.

All first year Journalism students will work with Fighthoax as part of their Digital Journalism module, beginning in March and lasting for a month. They’ll meet the team and aid them by benchmarking articles to see if their analysis matches up with Fighthoax’s AI interpretation.

Doing so entails reading a series of stories and manually researching the story and its writer, assessing the source and the sentiment of a story and identifying if there is any political bias. Students’ research will be compared to the results of the Fighthoax engine for the same article.

Organiser of the collaboration, lecturer Michael Kosmides, said:

“With our students’ help, Fighthoax gains valuable information about how well their engine works in relation to a human. In return, the students gain valuable experience in understanding concepts of bias and sentiment, coming to grips with verification and gaining invaluable professional experience.”

Head of the Division of Creative Technologies, Alan Lewis, said: “This is a great opportunity for our students to engage with an exciting tech start-up addressing the issues surrounding so-called ‘fake news’.

“It will no-doubt be a valuable learning experience for everyone involved, and we are looking forward to analysing the results.”