Use some colorful pictures and GIFs to ask family and friends to check their sources and information.
What if Instagram, WhatsApp and telegram had emoticons and
GIFs to obviously warn
their users concerning false
news, false photos and
false videos? Well, they don’t. Therefore some
fact-checking initiatives around
the world developed special stickers to be used instead in these
platforms. For now, they appear to
be a nice (and
colorful) way to tell
friends and family they’re spreading
low-quality information — and should think twice before sharing
content.
Teyit, in Turkey, announced last week a group of 16 purple, green and yellow stickers. Twelve
are in Turkish and 4 are
bilingual (in English). One, for
example, very straightforwardly asks: “What is
your source?” Another one shows a pointing finger
with a clear word on
the top: “Debunked.” And a 3rd sticker is a plain “This is false”
sign, something everyone can simply understand.
Teyit is the newest International Fact-Checking Network
member to take this
path, believing there has to be a non-hurtful way to tell close friends, parents, distant
relatives and colleagues they shared fake news and
should stop doing so.
Teyit hired the illustrator and sticker designer
İdil Keysan and additionally created
some moving versions of the
collection. The concept was
to be ready for
Instagram Stories, too.
“During the design process, we paid attention to the
stickers’ joyous use”, said Mehmet
Atakan Foça, Teyit’s founder. “Even once some people know the real story about
a suspicious claim, they still can’t find enough courage to
warn their friends, families, relatives — because it could seem offensive. Therefore we had to design stickers
not for insulting but for being
constructive and entertaining.”
He said the main aim was to force members
of WhatsApp groups to
be skeptical of claims. “We encourage people with these stickers to ask about the source, to check the information or to look at Teyit’s website before sharing content.”
During its initial 10 days, according to Giphy numbers,
Teyit’s collection was
viewed on Instagram Stories more
than 1million times.
Foça said he’s happy about it.
“Stats are excellent,” he said. however he said he’s looking forward
to seeing what he calls a boomerang effect within WhatsApp, after having sent the entire collection to more than 2,000 people who have
opted-in their WhatsApp contact list.
“We can’t get stats from WhatsApp however we expect to receive stickers back from unexpected sources. Will my grandpa send me our stickers? That would be a very shocking impact,” Foça said.
FactNameh, the Toronto-based Iranian
fact-checking platform, was most
likely the first to invest in stickers. Back in
2017, Farhad Souzanchi was already active on telegram (Iranians’ main communication platform) and he said he knew stickers were a significant part of conversations on that mobile app. the collection offers 26 options and is in Persian (Farsi).
“We imagined it would be a fun and lighthearted approach for people to discuss the accuracy of claims,” said Souzanchi.
“But we also created some stickers for other uses additionally and included various versions of Mirza’s (the platform impartial judge character) facial
expressions: laughing,
crying, kisses, etc.”
According to him, in the last 2 years,
FactNameh stickers have been used over 11 thousand times. However haven’t felt the
“boomerang effect” yet…