Autobotography Approach-HaleyC

Title: Social Media and the “News” Relationship Quiz

This is the quiz I would ask people to fill out. After I get the results I would post them in a graph for people to see, on some kind of web platform.

Background: The background for this project is to understand what people think about the relationship between social media and the news and how it’s changing our everyday society and future generations.

Explanation:  It’s becoming hard to separate what’s really going on in the world vs what is created for entertainment. In my opinion, the news and social media have blended, making people numb to things that could be scary or important. We think if we just hide behind our phones and don’t do anything then it will all be okay in the end, which is not the reality. I would like to find out what people of different age groups think about how social media and the news relate.

Credits: Myself

Budget: Time- a small amount of time to make the quiz online and link it to my social media for people to take

Money- no money required

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While using the same background topic for this project, I would like to change my approach.

After thinking about this idea more and what you said in your comment I think this issue could be solved another way. A quiz will only give me results and with those results I would only be able to make maybe a bar graph and spread the results around at best. However, since people mostly read the news now on their phones and laptops it would be interesting to have maybe an application/plug-in type of thing (such as adblocker) that would work with these websites and companies to stop the spread of the false news. The application could be an ongoing collaboration with people to end false news when they see it. This is more of an involvement type of project to attempt to put a stop to circulating false news. It includes the development of an application to filter things from a website for your own viewing as well as the cooperation of the company hosting the website to end the circulation of the bad news.

A lot of things I see on websites now are just clickbait and entirely false, but it only takes a few people to believe it’s true to start the flame. A recent MIT study showed that fake news is 70% more likely to be tweeted. Access to reliable, quality information should be a right of anybody, wherever they live. Stopping the source of the fake news is nearly impossible since it stems from everywhere, but we can stop the spread of it by disabling for ourselves and reporting it on popular websites.

I would develop this application in 4 steps:

• Envision the nature of the project, establish goals that my solution would achieve
• Devising a plan and how my project would be physically creative, what scripting language it would use and how long it would take.
• Development of the project in coding, testing and publishing data.
• Testing and stability of the application

The cost of this app with everyone involved would be, depending on the involvement of the news websites, probably between 10-50k. Since it is involved with other websites I can’t give an exact estimate.

Upon further investigation it looks like Google is already trying to do this with their new Google News app! “Google is taking its fight against fake news to the next level. The company has announced two new initiatives aimed specifically at supporting journalism and fighting the spread of misinformation on the internet.” https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-news-initiative/