With online news available at our fingertips, people would often take information at face value with disregard of fake news. The danger lies in being comfortable in our filter bubble that we fail to consider a different perspective.
Marianne’s post highlights that automated bots can form part of our perspective and it is important that we are aware of them. It is good to see Facebook implementing algorithms to identify and remove automated bots, so as to reduce fake news from being spread (Wagner, 2017). On our part, we should also identify these bots, in order to burst our filter bubble. In this image, I summarised how we can identify these bots.
Figure 1: How to spot bots? (self-produced via Piktochart with information from Tynan, 2012 ; MIT Technology Review, 2014 ; Wilson, 2017)
Through my dialogue with Marianne, we discussed how automated bots can manipulate people’s perception of politics. I learnt that Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) dominates the news scene in Singapore, though it is not government-owned, it is closely supervised by our political leadership. This seems to relate to why Singapore rank lowly in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index. In the case of the Mdm Halimah’s presidency, perhaps the media was involved in boosting her popularity.
Eva’s post provided me with a comprehensive approach to how I could evaluate online information. I learnt that information quality can vary depending on the user, the source, and the consistency. Given the vast amount of information available online, one needs to assess the quality of online information as it can affect an individual’s learning.
In my dialogue with Eva, I found out that 12% of Singaporeans do not worry about fake news. We discussed how Singaporeans may seem skeptical towards news and community centres can provide courses on digital literacies to the older generation, so that they may be less vulnerable to online scams.
To sum up my learning, I will leave you with this video and image.
Figure 2: My learning from commenting on 2 blogs (self-produced via PowToon)
Figure 3: Personal thoughts and learning (self-produced via Piktochart)
Word count: 300
Comments
References
Wagner, K., 2017. Facebook found a new way to identify spam and false news articles in your News Feed. [Online]
Available at: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/30/15896544/facebook-fake-news-feed-algorithm-update-spam
Feature image (self-produced via canva from Cao, 2015)
Living & Working on the Web 