A research project Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity project "is about empowering citizens to critically understand and engage with the information manipulations they encounter on the internet" so that citizens can become fact checkers. The project site is at https://fakenewsimmunity.liverpool.ac.uk/ and they have just released a chatbot which aims to train citizens to be sceptical and question the news they encounter. The two distinctive aspects are their analysis, using Natural Language Processing, of a database of news from fact checking sites (with the fact checkers evaluations) and their use of philosophical methods (and avatars of three philosophers - Socrates, Gorgias and Aristotle) in the chatbot. The demo chatbot is here if you want to try it out: https://fakenewsimmunity.liverpool.ac.uk/the-chatbot/. I must confess I got a bit impatient with the chatbot after a while, mostly beacuse of me not being able to guess what kind of answers it was expecting and would accept, or perhaps I'm just impatient.
Photo by Sheila Webber: wreaths of South London, December 2020
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