EUNOMIA

To test its prototype, EUNOMIA has launched and evaluated four pilots with different user communities. Insights will allow for improving usability as well as bringing EUNOMIA successfully to the market. The human aspects of online misinformation and the possibilities to combat it with technical tools were discussed at the ACM CHI conference in May 2021. An experts’ vision chat has been launched to discuss the topic of the global ‘infodemic’.

EUNOMIA is currently testing the prototype in multiple pilots to test the tools that allow social media users to assess information online, thus supporting them in identifying untrustworthy information. So far, four pilots have been conducted:

• From August to October 2020, the Decentralized Chapters community tested the EUNOMIA prototype to identify trustworthy and untrustworthy information travelling across a Mastodon instance.
• From January 2021 onwards, users of Blasting News were able to use a dedicated Mastodon instance to comment and discuss Blasting News articles.
• From March to May 2021, students of the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences tested and discussed the usefulness of the EUNOMIA solutions for the journalistic profession.
• From May to June 2021, students of the University of Vienna discussed the usefulness of the EUNOMIA solution, as well as the methodological aspects of piloting.

SYNYO researchers, responsible for evaluating the pilot outcomes, defined recommendations to further improve the EUNOMIA solutions: this includes aspects of usability to improve the user interface and user experience, as well as improvement of functionalities to successfully bring EUNOMIA to the market. Overall, participants agreed that EUNOMIA is useful and has the potential to help in the fight against misinformation, particularly through its ‘trust/don’t trust’ voting functionality. Further pilots will be conducted until the end of the project in November 2021.

Opinions, intentions, freedom of expression, … and other human aspects of misinformation online

Joining forces with Co-inform, an H2020 project focused on combatting misinformation, EUNOMIA researchers discussed human aspects of online misinformation with academics and representatives from WHO at the ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in May 2021. The workshop included researchers from various disciplines and geographic locations (Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and the UK).

In an interactive discussion, the workshop participants presented the nine accepted research statements in three clusters, focusing on (i) community and values; (ii) policies and regulations; and (iii) tools and technical solutions. This led to new insights for creating more ethical and impactful technical solutions. The insights will be published by the organisers and participants.

EUNOMIA launches experts vision chat

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, misinformation has been a global challenge. This has been reinforced through the rapid spread of both factual and misleading information during the health crisis, leading to what the World Health Organisation (WHO) has coined an ‘infodemic’. Joining forces with ARTICONF and HELIOS, EUNOMIA held an experts’ vision chat about the ‘infodemic’. Experts from related European and other research projects, journalists, educators and others discussed how this issue can be tackled., The experts’ visions are presented in short videos of 60 seconds which are available online.

Links

https://eunomia.social/

https://coinform.eu/

https://chi2021.acm.org/

Keywords

Misinformation, human factors, conference, piloting, validation, tools, infodemic