Sleeping Giants Brasil · Lab Livre (UnB)
AdsRay flags news articles that may be disinformation, using criteria written by specialists. Here, disinformation goes beyond false facts: it includes hate speech, attacks on minorities, prejudice and biased reporting without sources.
What guides the project
Social science specialists at Sleeping Giants Brasil write the criteria. Each one describes a disinformative narrative that recurs in the Brazilian debate.
A verdict carries the literal excerpt from the article, the criterion tied to it and a justification. Readers can check it and disagree.
The system points to what deserves a closer read and does not check whether the facts are true. Analysts review the verdicts, and changes are tested on cases reviewed by the specialists.
From portal to verdict
Every hour, the system finds the new articles of 57 Brazilian news portals and stores each one as a file. A defined set of those articles moves on to classification.
The region hosting the hub keeps 97% of its natural cover, according to city hall. For the municipal secretary, the figure shows that industry is an ally of the forest. The city expects to double production in the coming years.
Columns, blogs and editorials are filtered out first: opinion is not news. When in doubt, the article goes on.
An illustrative example of the format, not a real case.
Who makes it
Owns the methodology: writes the criteria, labels reference cases and judges whether a verdict is right.
A free technology lab at the University of Brasília. Builds and runs the collection, the classifier and the evaluation.
Provides the academic and scientific basis of the project.
The interactive map walks through the stages of the system, from the people involved to operations, with the decisions behind each one.
