The Lusa agency and Inesc-ID invite citizens to participate in the construction of a tool that will help fight misinformation, by answering a survey to assess the perception of credibility of news content.
The survey, which is available at http://inforadar.inesc-id.pt/inquerito/#artigo, is part of a larger project, under development, to build a tool whose ultimate goal is to stimulate the critical spirit of readers and thus contribute to their media literacy.
“The purpose of the application we intend to create is based on the idea that users should make informed decision on the information they consume and share, providing readers with a set of relevant indicators that allow them to critically evaluate the credibility of the information they are about to to consume”, explains Inesc-ID researcher Paula Carvalho.
The objective of this initiative, reinforces Paula Carvalho, “is not to censor, it is to empower readers, to provide them with the means that allow them to make informed decisions”.
In a first stage of development of this application, which is being developed by the Lusa agency and Inesc-ID, it was carried out an annotation study of a variety of news articles by a restricted group of communication professionals, which allowed the identification of relevant indicators to distinguish news credible from not credible.
As the tool is not specifically aimed at communication professionals, but at the general public, who are less sensitive to the principles and rules of journalistic writing, it was considered “essential that the previously identified credibility indicators by journalists are also assessed by common readers, to verify its relevance and consider its integration into the tool under development”, she said.
By participating in the survey, available online, which will be more successful the more people who participate, citizens will be checking aspects such as the strategies used in the news headlines, the mention in the text of credible sources, the author’s degree of impartiality, usually in line with the use of neutral and objective language, a coherent discourse, which does not resort to fallacies, etc.
“What we intend to investigate is the relative importance that users attach to each of these aspects, in order to select the attributes considered most relevant and informative to determine the credibility of the content they are confronted with”, explains the researcher from Inesc-ID .
Many works have focused on finding strategies to distinguish credible news from non-credible or fake news (known as `fake news`), but, according to the researcher, “this approach is very reductive, seeking to group together a very heterogeneous set of news content, and, ultimately, journalistic styles, in just two categories”.
Using the metaphor of colors, Paula Carvalho simplifies that “not everything is white or black. On the contrary, gray rules. Therefore, what we consider most appropriate is to assume that textual content can present different degrees of credibility, depending on the analysis of the indicators that seem relevant for a specific case.”.
For example, if the reader is confronted with a news article that reveals a low degree of linguistic rigor, use `clickbait` strategies in the title, to attract his attention and generate clicks, do not cite reliable sources and evokes the author’s opinions and sentiment, ” we believe that he will have no difficulty in making his own judgments about the credibility of the text”.
The aim of this tool is to understand which textual characteristics are more associated with rigorous journalistic content, on the one hand, and misinformation, on the other, from the perspective of a common reader.
Regarding the structure of the survey, each respondent is asked to read a text (randomly assigned) and answer a short questionnaire, consisting of a set of closed questions about that text.
This questionnaire highlights textual aspects that must be considered when critically judging the credibility of an article, having also a didactic character.
The researcher from Inesc-ID says she believes that, “by answering these questions, the reader is exercising his critical thinking, and it may happen that, in some cases, the initial intuition on the text credibility changes, after reflecting on the aspects he was confronted with”.
This is one of the objectives of the project: “The tool to be made available will increase readers’ awareness and critical thinking, and thus contribute to their media literacy”, she pointed out.
As the responses to this survey will be reflected in the tool, one may assume that readers will actively contribute to the definition of the “ingredients” that should make up the news nutrition labels.
The survey is included in the 5th module of the Ciberinformado Citizen Course, https://www.nau.edu.pt/pt/curso/cidadao-ciberinformado/, developed by the Lusa agency and the Centro Nacional de CiberSegurança, but it can be answered independently, without having to do the entire course. The Cyber-informed Citizen is now in its second edition, having so far had more than eight thousand participants.
The new module of the “Cyber-informed” course helps the trainee to understand and analyze the “nutritional information” of a news, considering all its content, from the credibility of the sources, the origin or if the text has a high emotional charge or subjectivity .
The “Ciberinformed Citizen” course lasts an average of four hours, is free, is intended for all citizens who consult online information and is available until August 31, 2021.
