" Don't believe everything you read on the internet just because it has been posted by a famous person" -Abraham Lincoln
We have all noticed all those juicy, surprising, shocking stories which appear in our facebook (other social media platform ) newsfeed and we hit the ever tempting " share " button. Later ( moments , hours, days or weeks ) we find out that the story was fake . We don't realize that we have helped spread misinformation. In what sometimes feels like a 24 hour, social media drive , breaking news cycle, fake news has a tendency to spread quickly across social networks.
What role then should social media companies in particular facebook, Twitter, and Youtube etc... play in fighting viral misinformation ?
This is what motivated us to build a platform where a person can browse through any kind of news across the globe with an assurance of obtaining pure information without the presence of any kind of exaggeration or misguidance. On this platform (app) people can anonymously and freely go through the news and can even contribute towards making the information genuine by providing an "Upvote" for a news which signifies that the news in True or by "DownVote" which would mean that the content is exploited and controversial.
We conducted a survey to see that is it only us that are facing the same issue ?
The response we obtained contained the following information about the general opinion of public over obtaining information through net ( news ) .
The above Affinity Diagram shows a consensus of all the responses we got. In a nutshell we observed that :
- In a research paper public by Stanford University which has proved its credibility over the years for publishing authentic data. It said that Artificial intelligence though very useful but cannot be used to identify such a large scale problem. Like Quora which is operated totally depending on man power (Data Scientists ),we envisioned a platform where people would not have to worry about fake data as it would already be filtered bu the community and our own team of independent fact checkers.
- We aim to be the organisation that provides all the giants in the industry with authentic data necessary to fight this war against viralisation of fake news by providing our Api's.
- To spot the problem of exaggeration over a particular content i.e to check the percentage of authenticity we have thought of integrating external API's of all the sources which have built their credibility over the years into our app so that we have a database of genuine article with proper information about the topic. We can identify tags which would be used when a fake news is posted by a person to be verified at our app . The tags and phrases in the content would be compared with our database to check how much extra information is modified over the original news.
We have all noticed all those juicy, surprising, shocking stories which appear in our facebook (other social media platform ) newsfeed and we hit the ever tempting " share " button. Later ( moments , hours, days or weeks ) we find out that the story was fake . We don't realize that we have helped spread misinformation. In what sometimes feels like a 24 hour, social media drive , breaking news cycle, fake news has a tendency to spread quickly across social networks.
What role then should social media companies in particular facebook, Twitter, and Youtube etc... play in fighting viral misinformation ?
This is what motivated us to build a platform where a person can browse through any kind of news across the globe with an assurance of obtaining pure information without the presence of any kind of exaggeration or misguidance. On this platform (app) people can anonymously and freely go through the news and can even contribute towards making the information genuine by providing an "Upvote" for a news which signifies that the news in True or by "DownVote" which would mean that the content is exploited and controversial.
We conducted a survey to see that is it only us that are facing the same issue ?
The response we obtained contained the following information about the general opinion of public over obtaining information through net ( news ) .
The above Affinity Diagram shows a consensus of all the responses we got. In a nutshell we observed that :
- 35% of the total obtain fake data about less than 25% .
- 45% of the people think that they see fake news about 25% of the times.
- 15% think that they get 3 fake news out of every 4 news.
- rest 5% get fake news all the time.
Major Sources of Fake news :
- Youtube
- Torrent sites
- Online ads
- Social media platforms ( majorly FACEBOOK, Twitter etc.. )
- Random Blogs
etc...
How do they currently verify the content :
- Digital Media ( Google it )
- Newspapers
- Reputed Publishers
- Reputed Publishers
- Inshorts
- BBC
- Ask People around
- Compare sources
etc..
We also asked them that if they get a single platform which is powered by people and artificial intelligence which would sort fake news , so would they be interested to use it and at the same time would be interested to contribute towards making the platform more reliable .
- About 85~% of the responses said that Yes they would be delighted to get a single platform where now they do not have to call and wander here and there to get the news verified and also that they would contribute if they know about some news if left unverified and would be in their knowledge then they would respond to prove its genuinity.
- About 85~% of the responses said that Yes they would be delighted to get a single platform where now they do not have to call and wander here and there to get the news verified and also that they would contribute if they know about some news if left unverified and would be in their knowledge then they would respond to prove its genuinity.
Because of such positive and common response ,We decided to build an app which would prove as a fake news (rumour) tracker and a news reading platform.
- In a research paper public by Stanford University which has proved its credibility over the years for publishing authentic data. It said that Artificial intelligence though very useful but cannot be used to identify such a large scale problem. Like Quora which is operated totally depending on man power (Data Scientists ),we envisioned a platform where people would not have to worry about fake data as it would already be filtered bu the community and our own team of independent fact checkers.
ref: " https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf ".
- Hence we concluded that this platform would initially be run by a group of experienced journalists like " Craig Silverman " who would be sorting out fake data and provide the genuine data regarding it on the platform for the readers to browse.
- Market for this product is the total population of people worldwide since we are talking about internet and so everyone is connected. Hence we expect the User Base to be almost everyone.
- We also have thought of collaborating with current News Regulators in the market which provide authentic data to the big firms so that they could provide a smooth User experience to their customer.
for ex: " http://www.emergent.info " , " https://meedan.com/en/check/ " .
These sites already include all the reputed journalist across the world which are contributing day and night to solve our issue of fake news.
- Once a proper Customer Base and data base of news is regulated and set , then we could easily automate the process of verifying a particular news without any hassle and that too withing a few moments.
- We aim to be the organisation that provides all the giants in the industry with authentic data necessary to fight this war against viralisation of fake news by providing our Api's.
- To spot the problem of exaggeration over a particular content i.e to check the percentage of authenticity we have thought of integrating external API's of all the sources which have built their credibility over the years into our app so that we have a database of genuine article with proper information about the topic. We can identify tags which would be used when a fake news is posted by a person to be verified at our app . The tags and phrases in the content would be compared with our database to check how much extra information is modified over the original news.
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