Try Now
"Raising Awareness to Find the Right Information."
TattleGEN is a web based platform, which acts as a forum for News Validation to fight fake news. The main purpose of TattleGEN is to help people identify which news is fake, and which is right – to avoid the propagation of misinformation, which has become a huge problem with social media these days. TattleGEN thus effectively showcases its motto of “Raising Awareness to Find the Right Information”.
I describe myself as a person with a constant urge to keep himself updates with things happening around – especially in the technological field. Since quite many years, I have seen people forwarding pointless and generally fake news, via things like Facebook and WhatsApp. These people seldom think about what they are sharing, because they don’t really care.
Recently, Facebook and WhatsApp have initiated a campaign to make people aware about Fake News, following serious incidents like mob lynching and defamation that these news forwards have been causing. Thinking over the matter made me realise that a majority of the people don’t really know if the news they are sharing is valid or not, and unintentionally become a part of the rumour. And the reason for unawareness is that there’s really no credible source that can directly inform people about the validity of a news. There are many trusted news firms who can be trusted with their content, but lack of accessibility to these restricts people from actively, easily and quickly checking if the news that are sharing is right or not.
What TattleGEN exactly does it to make this task of validation more direct, more easy and more credible – so that people can actually trust it.
TattleGEN literally is formed of two words – Tattle means gossip and Gen means providing someone with information. The name hence indicates providing the truth behing every ongoing gossip – and that’s what this forum does!
TattleGEN works through a community – a community of aware people who enquire the validity of certain news and actively indicate their own opinions - and professional moderators who are connected to credible news sources, and provide expert opinions on the validity of news.
Without creating an account, people can view all the Tattles and the responses on them – but cannot contribute to the forum, i.e., post Tattles or respond to Tattles. Signing Up or Signing In is easy – click on SignIn / Register at the top right, and enter your email address. If you are already a member, you will be asked to enter your password to sign in, and if not, you will be asked to Register.
Once you register, you would be made a regular user with normal privileges. Only certain users (criteria explained under Vision) shall be made moderators with higher privileges, as explained later.
Each user has a user page, a link to which is visible on each post or response belonging to the person, and on the Profile Dropdown at the top. The page displays some basic information along with the user's activity.
Each news that needs to be verified is called a Tattle. All that a person needs to do is enter the news that he wants to verify, optionally provide any links he wants to add (to tell where he got the news from, or to give context to the news) and additionally upload related photographs. Press on +TATTLE at the top to get to the form for posting Tattles.
Posted Tattles can be views at the site under two lists – Trending and Recent. You can view the validity for each tattle, that has been determined by the community, along with the Tattle information. Click on Read More under the Tattle to view the Tattle’s responses.
Once you get to the Tattle’s page, the main thing begins – Validation. All regular users can indicate if the tattle, in their opinion, is valid or not – by pressing the corresponding button, and mandatorily adding a link that supports their opinions, like a link to a news website which they referred. This activity can take place only once per user.
For moderators, though the opinion can be given only once, the links to provide credibility to their opinion can be added multiple times. This ensures that moderators have a better influence over everyone else’s response.
The most difficult aspect that TattleGEN had to deal with was generating trust. I consider trust to be social value – everyone needs to be a part of it.
TattleGEN is run by an administered community – in an open and consensual manner. On TattleGEN, everyone works together – and the overall functioning is controlled by the moderators. These moderators are top – level users selected by the site administrator, who has complete control over the entire website (as of now, I am myself the site administrator).
Even if a user, or a group of users, try to propagate a fake news by themselves voting in favour of it – the news will not be declared valid or invalid until the Moderators give their verdict. The vote of a Moderator is of higher importance than that of a normal user, and this ensures that the site cannot itself be used for spreading fake news. The validation is declared only after a certain criteria is met, and even the moderators cannot single handedly give any declaration – and multiple moderators are required to give their opinion, thereby checking each other too. There is a live chat support feature on the site, and anyone can use it to instantly ask anything or report any inappropriate behavior.
Thus, TattleGEN effectively generates a degree of trust and coordination by involving the entire community in decision making, hence being completely democratic and trustworthy. No one is himself supreme, it’s the opinion of the majority that is.
The ultimate vision is to make TattleGEN a universal forum that every person uses before sharing any news. The vision is to make the forum a part of social media websites like WhatsApp and Twitter, so that people can validate their news right before sharing it, within the social media site itself.
TattleGEN also aims to include more and more moderators to its nexus. These moderators are going to be expert professionals already working in the media and journalism fields. This can ensure better credibility of the moderators’ opinion.
Giving proffessionals from the media and news sector the oppurtunity to act as moderators on the firm will actually give them incentives to give more and more involvement. Posting links to news on their own news firm, while giving opinion of tattles, will actually also act as an advertizing for these companies. Apart, this would also create a healthy competitive environment so people from different news networks can provide more and better news from their sites to prove their firm’s expertise in the field. In the long term, this can also become a working business model and the status of moderators would become a premium feature for eligible users.
However, in all of this, it would be ensures that these moderators are actually positive contributors and there would be regular monitoring on them all. They would be warned, for improper behaviour, if needed, and if necessary, removed from the moderator status.
In the future, the algorithms working behind TattleGEN shall be improved to the extent that the community become self sufficient, without the need of a site administer to control the moderators. Moderators would then be made themselves by promiting certain eligible users, and the demoted periodically, for non-positive responses.
I am Mrigank Pawagi, a WebRanger! Simply enough, I am a wanderer, looking for knowledge - and a passionate about solving problems. Through TattleGEN, I aim to create a mass community movement, generating awareness about 'Fake News' so that people can be better internet users.