A student at the Toronto Metropolitan University has developed a new open-source tool to reduce the spread of misinformation online.

Indeed, Arvin Jagayat, a fifth-year Ph.D. psychology student, has recently received an award at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) national 2022 Storytellers Challenge for his Mock Social Media Website Tool. The software is set to generate simulated social media websites and collect detailed behavioral data on how participants interact with them.

By doing so, the tool can then see what motivates people to maintain positive social identities and prevent spreading or interacting with misinformation. This should help people control the type of information they interact with and bring more security and truth online. The open-source tool is done so that many people can contribute to it in the future and help facilitate research.

Currently, the student is aiming to make the software work on Facebook and then, Twitter, before going to other social media platforms.