Response 2 – Eric W ,Ethan C

One cultural issue that my partner and I discussed was the sudden upswing in fake news that is being spread around on social media and on other community platforms. This is something I have noticed over the last year or so that has popped up to a big cultural problem that we all face when we look at a news story. You never know what is fake and what is real and factual. This problem is to show people how important it is for them to look at the source they are reading and understand if that is a reputable News source on that information.

One question My partner and I asked ourselves was are we trying to fix this problem or are we trying to bring awareness to this issue. We couldn’t really decide on what we wanted to do so we came up with a plan to integrate both. I was more on the side of bringing awareness to the issue that is currently plaguing every news source we read today.

We thought of two possible solutions to this problem.

The first solution was to design and create a “News” organization website and published multiple stories under the pretense that these stories were factual. After publishing these sites we would personally share these stories on social media with our own comments on the story playing them off as real. After this, we would just watch to see what would happen with this story. It could go one of two ways either people would pick up the stories and start sharing it themselves or it won’t be picked up at all and it will just die. This in my opinion all depends on how the website and story are designed and executed. You need to find a happy middle ground where it’s believable but still pretty crazy enough for people to want to read about it. If the story was shared a good amount then we would put out another statement explaining this was all fake and people need to watch what they share and where they are reading their news from.

The other Idea we came up with was developing a plugin for your laptop or phone that allows it to read the article or story and examine and essentially see if what it is saying is true. If the plugin sees something that should be doubled checked it would mark the section in some way that the reader would be able to notice the possible false hoods. This idea would be more of the thinking of fixing the problem. This shows people in a visual way that sometimes when reading an article these articles could have falsehoods and people should be aware of this issue.

The fake news organization is many to many strategies. This is because once the original post is shared more and more people are seeing the story and giving their feedback on the article. Where in the plugin based option it’s a one-one strategy. The technology looks at what you’re reading and showing you a single person what could possibly be false.

Either one of these options have their perks and their downsides but they both bring awareness to this cultural problem of “fake news”.