In this workshop we provide citizens with tools to navigate mis-/dis-information in a critical way and improve their decision making processes during the pandemic and beyond. As part of our ESRC funded project “Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity” we developed a multi-player chatbot that teaches people how to recognize rhetorical strategies that are used to spread misinformation. In this way, people become their own fact-checkers.
We will begin by explaining the different information manipulations on the internet and then divide the participants to smaller groups to play with our chatbot. We believe that playing together is more powerful than individual learning, because people can debate, consult and understand together. After this we will reconvene and discuss what we learned, how the chatbot contributed to their understanding of misinformation and what can be improved.
With our project we hope to continue the conversation and expand the types of audiences we engage with to get insights and improve the chatbot. We hope to open a conversation with people who will tell us what works and what doesn’t so that we can tailor the way the chatbot responds to different audiences and communities needs. We will also circulate the project website (https://fakenewsimmunity.liverpool.ac.uk/) with contact details so that people will have the chance to directly reach out to us or leave comments on our comment page.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:While it is hard for us to know how many people will participate in the workshop we will be flexible and divide participants according to the amount of people who will show up. We will try to make diverse groups which have gender, age and ethnicity balance to have groups with different opinions. Each group will be provided with a short feedback form to evaluate the fake news immunity chatbot. The form will touch upon both content (e.g. were the examples relevant for me?), design (e.g. is the chatbot engaging? Who is your favourite participant and why?) We believe that creating these groups have the potential to create interesting discussions and engagements and that people will contribute from their own experience and then feed this feedback back to the discussion afterwards.
Elinor Carmi is a researcher, journalist and ex-radio broadcaster who has a passion for technology, digital rights, and feminism. Currently, Dr. Carmi is a posdoc at Liverpool University, UK.
Elena Musi is a Lecturer, PI on the ESRC project "Being alone together: developing fake news immunity". Her expertise lies at the interface between Linguistics, Communication Studies and Artificial Intelligence.