A large foundation
A human centered approach to tackling misinformation online
Fake news and misinformation are affecting the society at every level. Such news have resulted in families getting killed based on fake news, elections getting manipulated and even affects international organizations who do relief work in conflict situations. Our client wanted to understand why misinformation is being spread and how we can create a toolkit to handle misinformation.
Approach
We started by speaking with a number of internal stakeholders including legal experts, whatsapp group administrators, social media users, police officials, victims. We also did a few quantitative survey and ethnographic research with 10 whatsapp groups over a period of 2 months. In addition, we organized three workshops in collaboration with leading international organizations such as ICRC, UNAIDS, WHO
We segmented the users into three broad categories and we also shared insights on why users ‘share’ and ‘forward’ messages. We understood which groups perform well and which groups don't do well. We examined the role of norms and onboarding as well as group policing that led to good behaviours. We identified features that could be created to tackle the problem from a technological point of view.
We developed a tool kit and ran a pilot for 3 months in collaboration with our field partners across 3 contexts in 5 countries