A chatbot to guide the battle against Fake News

Generally, “bots” or “robots” have the capability to automate information and develop forms of artificial intelligence. In the field of “bots,” there are good and evil ones.

This last group includes bots that, for example, automatically flood social networks to attack an idea or person, or contaminate a genuine debate by diverting attention to another place. This mechanism has also been used in an increasingly damaging way to spread fake news.

Faced with this growing phenomenon of fake news, the team behind “Desconfío” Project is promoting the creation of a “good chatbot,” one that you could imagine drinking “mate” with (a hot tea very popular in Argentina). A bot that would fight the “malignant bots” that pollute our social networks. The project has won support from Hacks / Hackers and other organizations.

This tool is part of the “Desconfío Project” initiative that Datos Concepcion founded in February 2018. It’s growing alongside partner organizations such as the “Pocas Nueces” team and new international partners such as Hacks/Hackers and Chicas Poderosas Argentina.

A guide for news users
The development of this chatbot began with a prototype that is already online and has the ability to guide users who have little expertise in reviewing news content. The tool is already in beta. This first prototype was created with ChatFuel for Messenger and you can test it at this link: El Bot de Datos (The Data Bot).

We are also working on updating the bot using others platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, which will be available by the end of September 2020.

The ChatBot is programmed to guide you through different steps that can be followed to check parameters common in a fake news. Adrián Pino, from the Datos Concepcion team, said, “what we are looking for is to generate a friendly tool so that users with less experience in analyzing news feel invited to review the content, with an entertaining and interactive guide”.

Initially, the chatbot is designed in Spanish to interact with users in Argentina, but we intend to scale it on a regional level, incorporating idioms from Latin American countries and, later on, English.

The questions and queries the user can ask include basic items sources of the information for news quotes, whether the content uses Clickbait as a strategy to attract the attention of readers, if it has been shared in different social networks, and other tools. But as the Chatbot interacts with the user, it also suggests specific tools to verify images, sites to search the history of the article’s author,or extensions that can be installed in the browser that contribute to the detection and fight against fake news.

At the end of the intro tour, the Chatbot assigns a value to each response that the user provides, to produce a result at the end: “It is highly probable that the news is fake”, “It is difficult to determine if the news is fake”, or “It is very likely that the news is real.”

Currently, Datos Concepcion is completing the collection of data that allow the chatbot to guide users in detecting fake news. The project is open to those who want to contribute. Designing the questions that query the news content, graphic design, web design, communications, logo designs, social media campaigns and more still need to be done. To contribute, you can send an email to datosconcepcion22@gmail.com.