A major European project is aiming to build a social media "lie detector", sifting facts from rumour, it has been announced.
Public health experts have already been searching for ways to use social media to track epidemics and spot outbreaks of disease early.
Now psychiatrists in London are to play a key role in the new Pheme project, backed by the European Union.
The researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, will study the spread of discussions about recreational drugs as part of efforts to sift fact from rumour.
In the UK Sheffield and Warwick Universities are also involved in the project as is the University of Saarland, Germany, and the MODUL University Vienna in Austria.
The researchers want to sift rumours into four types: speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation.
Researcher Dr Kalina Bontcheva, from Sheffield, said: “We can already handle many of the challenges involved, such as the sheer volume of information in social networks, the speed at which it appears and the variety of forms, from tweets, to videos, pictures and blog posts.
"But it’s currently not possible to automatically analyse, in real time, whether a piece of information is true or false and this is what we’ve now set out to achieve.”
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