Stephen Downes

You read something on social media. You might want to know not only whether it's true, but where it came from, why it's there, and what might likely result. Meta had a tool called CrowdTangle to sort out the threads, but it was ultimately uninterested in it and killed it off in 2024. This article describes a new approach called Arbiter that "uses large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to pull posts from social media platforms and analyze them at scale. It collects data from social media APIs, academic data dumps, and third-party data scraping companies." Read down the story for a good illustration helping a journalist understand Mongolian libel law (more interesting than it sounds).