Professor Lorna Woods:

Let me follow up on that. Maybe solutions are not about looking at content but about companies looking at the factors they put into their recommender algorithms in terms of whether they value reliable content rather than content about particular stories. There was some research done on the recent Indian election and the role of WhatsApp. Some of it was suggesting that the intimacy of a WhatsApp group has an impact on people's tendency to believe. A question arises, therefore, about the design of groups. Are they really small groups of friends or are they just conglomerations of relative strangers? One might want to consider how easy it is to embed content from sources because one then gets contextualisation, which makes it more difficult for people to assess. There are issues with unintended consequences and design in respect of how we share information.