Approach 1—EricW

Background: During last week’s lab, I thought of the idea to bring attention to the growing problem of false news stories on social media and people mindlessly sharing these as true. I wanted to address this problem by creating part of that problem.

Explanation: I wanted to build a news site where I can post 2-3 News articles that are believable enough that people won’t think they are totally false but crazy people would share these on their twitter and Facebook accounts. After this, I will track to see how many people are sharing it and seeing where it is picked up. One issue I do see in doing this is that people need to share the story or believe it enough to share it. I believe this falls on the content of what the story is on. Right now is as good as a time with the current political sphere that is going on in our day to day life. So if you make a story about something trump said people are probably going to believe it because trump has been quoted in saying some crazy things. So this project will bring awareness to what fake news really is so that people will be more vigilant while on social media and not just share everything they see and being part of the problem.

Credits: I would credit Joline because I altered the plan slightly to accommodate for the difference of propaganda and News after this brought this up to me during discussions. My inspiration for this project came from all the social experiments with political topics. This is where I got the Social experiment idea for this project.

Budget: The time needed would be 7-14 days to develop the site and write the stories.The only materials I would need in this is to design the website and write the stories. Then I will only need to share the story on social media and see how people take to the article and if it gets shared by the people. The cost on this project would be very small because I will be doing the work and distributing it myself so there will virtually be no cost.