Opportunities that may result from implementation · Web viewThe internet enables people to...

BRD209 Assignment 3 Part B

Report

Page 1 of 11Claudia West (32442765) Claire-Louise Sykes (32208734) Lydia Young (32211652)

Contents

Introduction 3

Idea Finding 3

Solution Finding 6

The Solution 6

Strengths 7

Weaknesses 7

Implementation 8

Opportunities that may result from implementation 9

Conclusion 10

References 11


Introduction‘In the digital world’s never-ending stream of unfiltered, user-generated content, things are indeed

often not what they seem’ (Keen, 2008). The internet enables people to access masses of information at

their fingertips but it also allows people to easily develop and share misinformation, rumours, scams and

conspiracies. So how do we ensure society is well-informed and able to discern fact from fiction

amongst all the information available? There are small steps that can be taken to improve how well-

informed society is whilst decreasing the amount of fake content that is viewed and shared in our

society that contributes to being ill informed. This report will aim to discuss the possible measures that

can be taken to developing a well-informed Australian society. The report will also demonstrate how

these measures can be implemented and will conclude with a recommended solution. This report is

informed by individual research and group collaboration.

Idea Finding As with all wicked problems the challenge of developing a well-informed public in Australia has many

possible solutions, each with their own drawbacks and opportunities. It is not possible to find one

perfect solution to a wicked problem as the problem its self is difficult to define, there is incomplete and

contradictory knowledge surrounding the problem, and the problem often effects all of society not just a

single area (McCall and Burge 2016, 201). Therefore, focusing on a particular area of the issue is one

approach to solving wicked problems (Head and Alford 2015, 713-714).

We decided to approach the wicked problem of developing a well-informed public in Australia by

focusing on the issue of fake news and generating ideas to solve this aspect of the wicked problem.

‘Fake news’ has swiftly become a catch-all term to discredit all types of journalism, from newspaper

articles to blogs on social media. The public needs to be smarter at recognising and fighting this parasitic

fabrication. It has become such an epidemic no one knows the difference between what is true and

informative, and what is fictitious. Our individual fact finding approaches were all quite varied, but we

believe this is due to our different degree backgrounds. We all chose to review literature that was

relevant to the wicked problem of fake news however it wasn’t an important step in the process of our

idea generation as a group.


In efforts to come with up with successful ideas of how to solve a universal problem such as fake news

we used several idea finding tools to assist us. Mind-mapping was our initial step as we could all provide

our own opinions and create a widespread platform from where we could narrow down on an idea

which would deem appropriate to tackle this wicked problem. As external students we collectively

agreed to bring our own individual brainstorms of how we could potentially resolve a problem such as

‘fake news’ and then from there come to a group decision of how we could anchor our ideas. See Figure

1 for our individual idea generations and how similar themes were found.

From our individual brainstorms it became evident that we are all rational thinkers, therefore our ideas

all had potential solutions and thus became ‘obvious’ strategies. We decided to implement some non-

obvious ideas such as a brain surgery

option to have a microchip implanted that

could register fake news, almost like an

in-built alarm system. Or the

development of traffic-light colour glasses

that will cause a change of colour based

on the type of information you are

reading. Red would be “fake”, orange

would be “caution” and green could be

“most likely true”. As we individually

created our own mind-maps (Figure 1) we


Figure 2: Combined brainstorm in the form of a mind map.

Figure 1: Individual idea generations.

found we all had similar themes throughout our idea generations: education, technology and

government intervention. Using the resources of Skype and Google+, we were able to communicate

effectively in our idea finding and share our opinions. Through our Skype conversations we felt that the

best way to proceed from our individual brainstorms was to fuse our ideas based on the mentioned

similar themes. In Figure 2 our collective mind-map shows how we expanded from these themes. We

firstly discussed education as a form of intervention and for the possibility of classes to be created as

part of the curriculum to teach our younger generation of finding cues in readings or by having digital

literacy classes. It was through our discussion on this theme we decided that our target audience would

be the age group of 15-25 year old as this is the most ‘socially-active’ and tech-savvy generation.

Although we generated many ideas based on an education intervention, we believed this would be

more of a long-term solution. Government intervention was another theme we discussed and we came

up ideas such as creating policies, have institutions incur fines if there published news was deemed

‘fake/false’ or making it illegal to place advertisements on fake news stories in an effort to cut the

income from these types of yellow journalism. However we realised quickly that these types of

measures would conflict with the legal status of ‘free speech’ within our communities and could create

more division than unity throughout the global public. Finally the theme of technology deemed to be

the best avenue to tackle this wicked problem.


Technology and our target

audience go hand-in-hand and

through the idea generation tools

of mind-mapping and

storyboard/visual mapping we

collectively agreed on creating a

service where the public had the

power to rate the news they read.

We decided doing a storyboard

would be another way to visually

depict our idea generation. We

believe it demonstrated the anchoring of our fundamental idea. See Figure 3 for a visual representation

of our idea finding. The storyboard shows how the public are consistently bombarded with false

information and how it can be overwhelming, especially as most Australians read news online. But being

online also can grant the public a sense of power on what they choose to read and choose to disregard.

As social media giant Facebook is used by the majority of the Australian public, it is the most likely public

stage for fake news to flourish. Therefore the idea of using a quick and easy star rating tool could be the

first step in discrediting certain types of journalism, and being able to sift through the fictitious

information that is flooding our social media news feeds. We attempted to expand on this idea by using

other tools such as SCAMPER, however found it quite difficult to assign our ideas to the meaning of each

letter in SCAMPER. We collectively agreed that our mind-mapping and storyboard generations were

sufficient and useful tools to begin finding solutions to our idea on a star-rating tool through Facebook.

Solution Finding In the solution finding process we decided to focus on developing a well-informed public by making it

possible and easy to identify fake news and assess the credibility of news articles on Facebook. We

decided to focus on this aspect because an increasing number of young people rely on their Facebook


Figure 3: Visual representation of idea finding in the form of a story board.

news feed to provide them with the latest news and information (Sveningsson 2015, 1-3). The majority

of young people do not watch the news or read the newspaper, but source news information from their

Facebook news feed (Sveningsson 2015, 4-5). However, it is often difficult to determine if the

information that appears on Facebook is credible or fake news. Therefore, in developing a well-informed

public it is important to provide young Facebook users with a means to identify fake news. Given the

ideas generated in the idea finding process it was decided that the most viable and appropriate solution

was to develop a five star credibility rating that would become a feature on Facebook.

The Solution The credibility rating system would rely on people reading an article that has appeared on their

Facebook news feed, then rating the article from no to five stars depending on how credible the reader

thought the article was. For example, assuming the reader is of rational mind and they read an article

that did not reference a source, was highly biased, used poor grammar/language and was published by

Buzzfeed, they would select no stars or one star as the articles credibility rating. However, if the same

reader were to read an article that was well referenced, well written and published by a legitimate

source, they would rate the article with four or five stars. A rating would not appear under a news story

until the story had been rated by a minimum of 5,000 people and then the average of these 5,000

ratings would appear as a third bar underneath the “Like, Comment, Share” bar on each Facebook post

displaying the news article. This would help to ensure an average of ratings is taken before people are

allowed to rely on the rating to determine the credibility of a news article.

Strengths Having one body or a government regulator that assesses an articles credibility creates an issue of

freedom of press, freedom of speech or limiting of business. One of the main strengths of the credibility

rating system is that it is regulated by the people and not by a central authority or government body,

therefore it does not have the issue of violating freedom of speech, freedom of press or limiting

business. All information is allowed to be published but it is the general public that decides the

trustworthiness of the information.

Assuming Facebook agrees to the feature being added and the program is written it would not take long

for the rating system to be accessible by the public and become effective. This is another strength of this

solution as it provides almost immediate action on the fake news issue, unlike other solutions that were


found, such as implementing information literacy classes in schools which could take years to become

effective and would only be improving the information literacy of school aged citizens and not that of

the general public. This brings attention to another benefit of the rating system, which is its accessibility

by people of most age groups. Although the rating feature is targeted to younger Facebook users, this

does not stop the feature from being beneficial for people of all ages provided they have a Facebook

account.

The other strength of this solution is simple and easy for people to use. People do not have to click on a

link or access the credibility information anywhere else as the rating will appear underneath the

Facebook post, people will see the rating as easily as they see the number of likes on a post or how

many times the post has been shared. The system for making a rating will also be simple to use. Once a

person has accessed an article and wishes to return to Facebook a message would be displayed that asks

the reader if they would like to rate the articles credibility and then the reader would select however

many stars they thought for the articles credibility.

This solution is also relatively inexpensive to run once it has been developed.

WeaknessesAs with all wicked problems no solution is perfect and most solutions will have their drawbacks or

aspects that create another problem. This solution is no different and comes with a number of its own

weaknesses. The most obvious of these is the potential for the rating system to be miss used or

spammed. People could access news articles with the intention to miss rate them in order to drive down

or up the articles credibility rating. Unless a feature was put in place people could also potentially access

and rate an article multiple times, therefore changing the rating of the article. The system relies on there

being more rational readers then irrational, if in some case the number of readers believed the story

was credible and it actually was not this would give the article a false rating. For example, an article is

published about the benefits of vaccination and checks all the boxes for being credible, but the majority

of people that rate the article are anti-vaccination advocates, therefore these raters decide to give the

article a one star rating simply because it goes against their view not because they believe it is not

credible. This makes the article appear to be of poor quality when in fact it is the rater using the system

incorrectly.


Another weakness of this solution is that it focuses only on Facebook and the fake news circulating on

this website, it does not attempt to solve for the fake news that appears on other websites, such as

Twitter, Google+, etc. However, the same rating system could potentially be implemented in these areas

as well. If people do not use Facebook as an area of sourcing news, then this solutions usefulness is

limited. Only the people that have a Facebook account can use the credibility rating system, which

means the credibility ratings will heavily reflect the credibility assessment of people aged between 18-29

as 90% of Australian Facebook users fall in this age group (Sensis Social Media Report 2016, 4). As the

key to the ratings system is a diverse range of people providing ratings it is a drawback that only people

using Facebook can access the ratings.

Implementation Implementation of the credibility rating can be broken down into three main steps:

1. Engage Facebook to agree on implementing the feature on the website

2. Either have Facebook develop the rating system or find independent developers to create the

rating system as a separate service that Facebook can use

3. Gain acceptance for the rating system from Facebook users and encourage users to rate

properly

Having Facebook agree to add the rating system as a feature appears to be a major challenge, however

Facebook has already committed to solving the problem of fake news on their website (Barcla 2017, p.

3). Therefore, it is likely Facebook is open to proposals of how to solve the issue. The proposed rating

system has the potential to benefit Facebook as a company by providing a better service to their users

while not limiting the freedom of speech or introducing expensive review processes on articles that

could be viewed as censorship.

The second step of implementing the solution should not be difficult as development of the rating

feature is unlikely to pose a challenge for Facebook’s engineers. However, with proper planning a

solution could be developed that can be reused by other social media providers such as Google+ and

Twitter so there is chance for collaboration or independent development.

Since the rating system is intended to be prominently placed underneath the articles, getting users to

engage with it should not be difficult given its prominent visibility. However, getting people to rate

responsibly, combat rating spam and prevent fake ratings poses a challenge on its own. Raising


awareness of the feature and its intended use to keep users engaged will require ongoing effort. The

focus needs to be on communicating the benefits of the feature to the individual user and making the

feature simple to use and obvious in its function. Maintaining user acceptance would require its own

idea generation process, however numerous possibilities are available, such as reminders or

advertisements of the feature, endorsements by celebrities or raising awareness through education.

Opportunities that may result from implementation The feature has the potential for further development and expansions that would allow for additional

data on people’s rating decisions to be accessed. This would be achieved by adding features that ask

people about why they rated an article a particular way, such as was the article heavily biased, were the

references incomplete or inaccurate or was the article poorly written. This data would help understand

why people give the ratings they do and make it possible to add a feature that suggests why an article

has a particular rating, which could help people discern whether they wish to read an article or not.

Another opportunity is to allow users to filter articles that do not have a credibility rating of more than a

certain amount of stars or do not meet certain criteria. This setting would allow users to control the

quality of news that appears on their Facebook stream. This has the benefit of reducing the reach of

articles with a lower rating as they will not be seen by as many people. The option to see only news

articles over a particular rating does come with the drawback that people who do not see low star

articles cannot participate in rating them for the benefit of others.

With the acceptance of this feature by society it has the potential to be integrated into other social

networks and news publishers such as Google+, Twitter or popular news aggregators such as Buzzfeed.

This helps to reduce fake news in other areas beyond Facebook because people will recognise fake news

as a problem not isolated not only to Facebook.

Conclusion The 5 star Facebook rating is inexpensive to implement, simple to use and can be used almost

immediately. Adding this feature to Facebook, a platform with many users, it will reach a large audience

and have a great impact. Social media dominates the way millennials consume news (Taylor, 2016) and

it is therefore important to consider changes to such platforms. The 5 star rating program has the

potential to be implemented by other online platforms making it versatile and appropriate.


A well-informed society can be developed in a number of ways, this report has focused on one of these

ways. Although we have made a recommendation for one solution, as we have demonstrated in this

report there are many possible solutions for developing a well-informed public in Australia, some which

may be more suited to particular groups of people than others. We also acknowledge that is it not one

solution on its own that will resolve the issue of trying to develop a well-informed society in Australia.

There will need to be a wide variety of solutions considered and implemented.

The implementation of the 5 star Facebook rating would hopefully be a gatekeeper to filter truth from

fiction, legitimate information from errors or outright deceit (Keen, 2008) online. With a large potential

target group, the implementation of the program it is a step in the right direction to eliminating fake

news and informing society.

ReferencesBarcla, Paul. 2017. ABC News: How to combat fake news in the age of Facebook. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-27/how-to-combat-fake-news-in-the-age-of-facebook/8390236

Head, Brain W. and John Alford. 2015. “Wicked Problems: Implications for Public Policy and Management.” Administration & Society 47 (6): 711–739

Keen, Andrew. 2008. The cult of the Amateur: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

McCALL, Raymond and Janet Burge. 2016. "Untangling Wicked Problems." Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing: AI EDAM 30 (2): 200-210.

Sensis Social Media Report. 2016. How Australian People and Businesses Are Using Social Media. https://www.sensis.com.au/asset/PDFdirectory/Sensis_Social_Media_Report_2016.PDF

Sveningsson, Malin. 2015. “It’s Only a Pastime, Really: Young People’s Experiences of Social Media as a Source of News About Public Affairs.” Social Media and Society 1 (2): 1 – 11

Taylor, David. 2016. "Social media dominates way millennials consume news, prompting alarm, Deloitte survey says." ABC.


Date post:	15-Sep-2020
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	1 times
Download:	0 times

Opportunities that may result from implementation · Web viewThe internet enables people to...

Documents