Twitter acquires UK start-up to combat disinformation

Twitter has acquired London-based start-up Fabula in an attempt to combat online disinformation, though the terms of the acquisition currently remain undisclosed.Twitter said the acquisition could improve the health of the conversation, with expanding applications employed to halt spam and abuse.Another potential result of the acquisition mentioned was the strengthening of Twitter’s internal machine learning capabilities, with the addition of a team of machine learning researchers from Fabula who employ graph deep learning to detect network manipulation. It will also be a key step towards helping people feel safer on Twitter and assist them in finding relevant information.Graph deep learning is a novel method for applying powerful ML techniques to network-structured data. It allows the analysis of very large and complex datasets describing relations and interactions, and the extraction of signals in ways that traditional ML techniques are incapable.By studying and understanding the Twitter graph – comprised of millions of tweets, retweets, and likes shared on Twitter every day – Twitter will be able to improve several other product features, including the timeline, recommendations, explore tab, and onboarding experience.Twitter is currently building a research group – led by Sandeep Pandey, head of ML/AI engineering at Twitter – to focus on some key strategic areas such as natural language processing, reinforcement learning, ML ethics, recommendation systems, and graph deep learning.“We are really excited to join the ML research team at Twitter, and work together to grow their team and capabilities. Specifically, we are looking forward to applying our graph deep learning techniques to improving the health of the conversation across the service,” said Michael Bronstein, co-founder of Fabula.