Project Lead
School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries
Email: reem.talhouk@northumbria.ac.uk
Project Themes
False and misleading information (including misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and fake news) impacts day to day society by impacting health decisions, political decisions and more generally civic discourse. Platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, & TikTok) have integrated interventions into their platforms to limit the impacts of misinformation. However, misinformation spread offline is un-monitored and un-regulated. The prospect of monitoring this offline spread through technology is riddled with privacy concerns, however dystopian fictions such as 1984 (George Orwell) often include surveillance of this type. Unfortunately, we currently live in a world where on/offline discourse has the potential to cause widespread violence in urban environments (shown by the Southport riots).
This project aims to take existing prototypes designed to cue social misinformation correction via a mobile phone, to design a speculative system similar to Contact Tracing approaches observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is with the intention of exploring (using the SpeculAItive Futures platform) public perceptions of a future where a contact-tracing approach, based on voice data tracking misinformation spread in face-to-face conversations, could track the offline spread of information, and potentially provide a corrective response.
Speculative design methods allow researchers to explore a potential future with specifically thought-provoking questions. The image below shows a possible future where contact tracing is used to update advertisements in urban settings to provide corrections to information being shared in those locations. This speculative design would consider questions around user privacy, source of correction, and other well-known concerns about the spread of misinformation.
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