Fake news or misinformation on social media platforms\nis a growing phenomenon in the world and can have a profound social, economic,\nand political impact on societies ranging from election interference,\npolarisation, and violence. This problem is particularly challenging in\ndeveloping countries where lower levels of literacy and limited exposure to\ntechnology can make users more susceptible to believing and acting upon\nmisinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
LUMS faculty, Dr. Ayesha Ali (Assistant Professor of\nEconomics) and Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi (Associate Professor and Chair, Department\nof Computer Science) were recently awarded a research grant by Facebook for\ntheir proposal on understanding the impact of digital literacy on the spread of\nmisinformation in Pakistan. The highly prestigious Facebook Integrity\nFoundational Research Award was awarded to only 11 proposals from across the\nworld in 2019, which included proposals from Stanford University, Princeton\nUniversity, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Michigan\nUniversity. Out of these, only two awards were given to Universities outside\nthe USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Presenting the results of their research, Dr. Ali gave\na seminar at Facebook in Menlo Park, California and later, she was invited to\ndeliver a seminar at MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Ali and Dr. Qazi conducted a household level\nsurvey to capture the trends in social media use among low and middle-income\nusers in the city of Lahore, Pakistan and evaluated the effectiveness of two\neducational interventions for countering misinformation among populations with\nlower levels of digital literacy in a randomised control setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Using a list of actual news stories circulated on\nsocial media to measure the extent to which users are likely to believe\nmisinformation, the first intervention educates users about common features of\nmisinformation through a video in a local language, while the second\nintervention in addition to the video provides feedback to users about their\npast behaviour in engaging with misinformation. \u201cWe found that showing the\nvideo alone has no effect, while showing the video and giving personal\nfeedback, on average, increases the ability of treated users to identify\nmisinformation by 11% relative to the control group. The effect persists even\nafter a lapse of 4-6 weeks after the experimental intervention,\u201d shared Dr.\nAli.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is a very encouraging result because it opens up\nthe possibility of implementing such interventions on social media platforms at\na larger scale. It also provides insights towards avenues for future research\nsuch as exploring the role of who delivers the message and examining\ndifferential changes in behaviour depending on the strength of prior beliefs,\u201d\nadded Dr. Qazi. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fake news or misinformation on social media platforms is a growing phenomenon in the world and can have a profound social, economic, and political impact on societies ranging from election interference, polarisation, and violence....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6938,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936\/revisions\/6938"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitaldips.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}