A User Experience Approach to Fake News
- Workshop
- Content Strategy & Information Architecture
- 07. November
- 09:00 - 10:45 AM (CET)
- C9.2
-
Ray Gallon
- The Transformation Society
Contents
In this workshop, we explore together how methodologies from UX might offer a path for people to combat dangers arising from the climate of mistrust in institutions traditionally viewed as trustworthy sources of record, brought about by the way information was handled – or mishandled – during the Covid pandemic, and the advent of widely available generative AI technologies and Large Language Models (LLMs). This has led to the widespread possibility of everything from intellectual property theft to the creation of very believable deep fakes that can alter election results or change the outcomes of wars, and the spread of wild conspiracy theories where science becomes “an opinion like any other.” We'll use programmed activities, interaction, and consciousness-raising to adapt the workshop examples to your own situation, following Roger C. Schank's notion of generalizing learning from one task to a new similar task. We’ll tackle questions such as motivation, the spread of memes on social networks, the behavior of “authoritative sources,” and how applying techniques from user research can help us gain insight into how to deal with them as practitioners of a discipline where reliability of information is paramount, but facts no longer convince.
Takeaways
- Truth alone will not defeat fake news but we TCs have to ensure our information is verified and true
- Fake news and false memes on social media are spread because of their gut appeal
- UX can be useful to confront fake news
- Mindset is crucial
Prior knowledge
None special - just an open mind and a passion for truth.