Readings:
[1] Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter
Summary:
In this paper the author talks about the ecosystem around fake news/alternative news/conspiracy theories. In order to study such an ecosystem, author took an interpretivist approach to understand the ecosystem — by “blending qualitative, quantitative and visual methods to identify themes and patterns in the data.” The data was collected from Twitter Streaming API, tracking on words that could indicate a shooting — such as gunmen, shooter, shooting etc. — over a 10 month period, resulting in 58M tweets. An extremely high tweet count, for a single topic, was the result of 3 high profile mass shootings — Orlando(FL), Munich(Germany), and Burlington(WA). To extract tweets related to alternative narratives, author used key words like false flag, crisis actor, hoax etc, resulting in 99,474 tweets. After getting the tweets, the author carried out a great deal of classification of the accounts and the domains that the links point to. During their analysis, the author created a network graph to fully understand the alternative news ecosystem. Interestingly enough, the author found thematic similarities between conspiracy theories, and alternative narratives of real life events.
Reflection/Questions:
This was an extremely interesting read for me as conspiracy theories are my guilty pleasure, but only for entertainment reasons. 58M tweets were collected relating to gun shootings, however only 99,474 were identified as being related to alternative news. Seeing how only an extremely small percentage (around 0.17%) were related to conspiracy theories, I would say this is not an epidemic YET. Whilst reading this paper, I started thinking about possible solutions or tools to raise awareness amongst readers; without banning/blacklisting websites/pages/users who indulged into such sort of activities. I came up with the following system.
New Design:
Background: I would say there is a difference between information and news. Information includes both opinions and facts and may or may not be verified; news (in its typical sense) is only facts and is verified from multiple sources. Stemming from this difference, citizens should only be allowed to freely disseminate all the information they want, however they should not be allowed to disseminate any sort of news. Only authenticated citizens should be allowed to disseminate news, we can call them e-journalists. Same goes for websites, and pages on faceboook (and other social media websites). The system I am going to outline, only focuses on websites.
Assumption: User is a male, and the platform that is under discussion is Twitter (can be scaled to other platforms also).
Explanation of the system: The system has multiple facets to it.
A) Each time a user cites an authenticated website as a news source on his tweet, he gets some reward points (for being a responsible citizen). Each time a user cites an unauthenticated website as a news source, he gets penalized for that. If the user ends up having 0 points, he will not be allowed to cite any more unauthenticated websites unless he gains some points by citing an authenticated source first. Let’s call this point system “Karma points”
B) When the user posts a link to an unauthenticated website as a news source, he will get a warning pop up window when he presses the tweet button. The pop up window will let him know that the news source is not authenticated, could include some more discouraging language, and then will have a confirm button — which will allow him to cite that website anyway. When that tweet is finally posted, it will have a warning next to it. The warning will let other users know that this specific tweet has cited an unauthenticated website as its news source. This will discourage the user from citing such websites in the first place.
C) When a different user(the reader) clicks on the unauthenticated website, he will also get a pop warning saying that he is “about to enter a website that is not identified as an authentic news source.” He would have to click the confirm button to move forward. The readers Karma points will remain unaffected.
Affects of the design: I believe such a design will caution people when entering an unauthenticated website cited as a news source. It will also dissuade people from sharing such websites that tend to have fake news/ conspiracy theories. The process of dissuasion will come first as a caution (before they post) and then as shame (when their post is marked with a warning label and reduced karma points).
