Lighthouse: Combatting Disinformation On Encrypted Messaging Services
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With the advent of social media as a crucial news source for the average smartphone owner, the spread of disinformation, and curated fake news, as a tool for political propaganda on encrypted messaging services is becoming an expanding threat to the public’s perception of news and journalis- tic accuracy. While several systems are in place to detect fake news on public networking platforms, the availability of encrypted messaging has made disinformation notoriously easy to disseminate but challenging to detect in the quest to alert users of fallacious information. Based on previous research that found that increasing awareness of fake news can noticeably reduce its spread, we designed Lighthouse, a standalone application that makes use of notifications from WhatsApp to detect links that have been professionally flagged as disinformation, and alerts users to potentially spurious news articles that have been sent to them. Lighthouse uses the NewsGuard disinformation database as a truth source with the intention of increasing accuracy awareness in the context of fake news as a method to fight the further spread of disinformation. The current implementation of the app serves as a starting point for the further study of disinformation dissemination and intervention methods aimed at addressing curated fake news on platforms protected by end-to-end encryption. It was used by 10 university students over one-week periods to test for database relevance and was found to positively influence the ability to identify disinformation and demonstrated the potential to alter sharing habits.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | July 28, 2022; May 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ragothaman, SriRaagavi |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Bernstein, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Hancock, Jeff |
| Thesis advisor | Seering, Joseph |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University |
| Department | Department of Computer Science |
Subjects
| Subject | Disinformation |
|---|---|
| Subject | Encrypted Messaging Services |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Ragothaman, S. (2022). Lighthouse: Combatting Disinformation On Encrypted Messaging Services. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/bd836yq4987
Collection
Undergraduate Theses, School of Engineering
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- Contact
- raagavi158@gmail.com
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