Hoax Diet

Inspiration

We believe the best way to prevent hoax news is by giving the fair perspective why some people think the news as hoax and why some people think the news as fact. We did this by integrating the power of community (as human intelligence) and artificial intelligence.

While many developer use AI to learn the pattern of hoax news, we did different approach. We use AI to learn the pattern how people react to hoax news. AI on Hoax Diet is designed to be the bridge for community to fight hoax together.

Why Community? Hoax news this day become smarter and very hard to be differentiated with fact news. This problem become more complex because many hoax news are created by analysing the psychology and people profile and interest so it makes the people who read it (no matter how well educated they are) can be easily fooled by the hoax, if they do not be careful and do not try to validate the information.

This is why we need the power of community to analyse a news hoax or fact. And we did this by giving the chance to the member of community to be a voter where they can vote is a news hoax or fact.

Why Artificial Intelligence? Even though community voting can be a strong solution for hoax preventing, but sometimes there are several voting bias that can happen:

If the voting process been showed to public (like public polling), voter will tend to follow the majority voices.
Some people already bias on some topic (the supporter of Donald Trump will think every bad news about him as hoax).
If the voting been dominated by people who already bias, the voting will not give the good result.

This is why we need to integrate the artificial intelligence on this community to prevent these classic bias issues.

What it does

Hoax Diet is a community to fight hoax together in form of bot messaging platform. There are 3 roles in this platform:

Voting requester: is member who request to do a vote on a news (that has not been voted before).
Voter: is member that has been selected by our platform to vote on a news that voting requester asked.
Questioner: is member who wants to check is a news hoax or fact based on the voting result.

Each interaction happens between member and bot. There is no direct interaction between each member of community.

Voters are selected by our platform based on the population random sampling. Each time a voting has been finished, the system will analysed the result. If there is a voter who does not follow the voting rules (such as giving wrong answer intentionally, not objective during the voting, and many more) the voter will not be selected on the next voting. This is where the role of AI backed up system will be. The AI will learn the pattern of voters, to learn the pattern of voters behaviour during the voting.

The voting is a closed private voting process, it means every voter will give their vote by giving their answer on messaging platform, privately. Only the voter that has been selected by the system that can give their vote on the specific voting. Each voting may have different voters.

By using this approach we can make sure the privacy of each member, and prevent the bias during the voting process.

Private and anonymous voting also will prevent any conflict between members that frequently happen at hoax discussion group.

How We built it

We did our research to find out why it's hard to fight hoax news. We met several anti-hoax communities in Indonesia. We also met several developer who already implementing AI technology to analysing the hoax news. From both of them we learn that both side approach has their own advantage and disadvantage, and we want to give middle solution for both these approaches.

This is why we build community based messaging bot platform that is backed up by AI technology to fight the hoax news together.

Challenges We ran into

Finding the best method how our platform can integrating the power of community and the power of AI technology on fighting hoax. We need the most simple yet practical solution.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Finding the simplest solution to integrate community and AI technology so they can collaborate together on fighting hoax on social media, especially Facebook

What We learned

Fighting hoax can't simply be executed 100% by Artificial Intelligence only, because hoax news always evolve and become harder and harder to be differentiated with real news.

Pure anti-hoax community group also is not too efficient because they still need moderator to control the polling process and preventing conflict between group members. The result also frequently become biassed because the classic public polling problems.

Some news even can't be completely judged is it hoax or fact, because booth side has strong evidence (grey's area news).

On hoax war problem, we still need human intelligence, where AI become the middle technology to facilitate this.