Designing for Social Impact: Access to Information
One of the great paradoxes of the internet age is that the more information we have access to, the less certain we are that we can trust any of it. And while the concept of fake news certainly isn’t new, Americans have grown increasingly concerned about it, particularly in the wake of the last U.S. presidential election.
As long as news outlets are dependent on ad revenue to survive and algorithms help dictate how we access information, fake news isn’t likely to go away. But in the meantime, there are several nonpartisan and governmental organizations that exist to help people access and verify information. I’m going to talk about a few of them here.
Election Guides
Colorado publishes a “blue book” with comprehensive ballot information that is available in print and online. I’ve always been registered to vote in Colorado, so I took it for granted that every state did this. It turns out not all states make an effort to publish nonpartisan election information, and, even among the states that do, this info is not always available both in print and online. If you’d like to find out what your state publishes, Ballotpedia is a good place to start.
If you’re lucky enough to live in California, there’s ballot.fyi, which was created by Ideo designer and artist Jimmy Chion. Chion found California’s state-issued info pamphlet imcomprehensible, so he decided to create a more accessible version.
For people who don’t have access to a state-sponsored pamphelt, Ballotpedia is a good resource. Ballotpedia is a comprehensive, online encyclopedia of American politics. According to its website, it is sponsored by the Lucy Burns Institute, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization funded entirely by private contributions and based in Middleton, Wisconsin. Although Ballotpedia is headquartered in Wisconsin, its contributors work remotely from all parts of the country. In addition to covering politics across the U.S., Ballotpedia also has a fact-checking desk. Currently, Ballotpedia gets about 64,000 unique visitors daily (that’s according to Alex.com).
The People’s Eagle was another tool for accessing information about American politics. Launched in 2016 (by a graduate of the program I’m currently enrolled in, full disclosure), the People’s Eagle was a chatbot accessed through Facebook’s messenger app that helped people learn about and participate in politics in a “fun and effortless” way.
General Fact-Checking
With an estimated 6,750,000 unique visitors per month (again, according to Alexa.com), snopes.com is a popular general fact-checking site. The site’s credibility has been challenged frequently by both liberals and conservatives in the U.S., though it is more frequently accused of having a liberal bias.
In early December 2016, NPR published this guide to assessing whether or not a piece of information was fake. Perhaps inspired by NPR, the Denver Public Library has begun offering classes on how to spot fake news. A friend of mine took her father to one earlier this year.
If you happened to click on the first link in this story, then you know that, in 1835, a paper called the New York Sun convinced people throughout the U.S. — including faculty members at Yale — that there were bat people living on the moon. In a strange way, I take some comfort this knowledge. At one point in the past, enough of us were collectively able to filter out the noise of the attention-grabbing penny presses from the real news, and I think we’ll be able to do it again.
It’ll be quite a battle, though.
