16/12/2020
The most important web design trend and Social Media Marketing of 2020
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s no secret that we’ve entered what many are calling the “post-truth” era, with myriad instances of deep fakes, misinformation campaigns, and outright lies popping up, gaining viral traction, and ultimately shaping the decision-making of millions—all too often driven by prominent individuals who will here go unnamed. One of the biggest web design trends of 2020 will be designing truth.
SOCIAL MEDIA’S SLOW MARCH TOWARD TRUSTWORTHINESS
The major social media platforms have each come out with policies—and in some cases, designs—to account for this flourishing of untruths.
Facebook has decided that it simply won’t intervene with political untruths. To support its stance, the platform has cited everything from the First Amendment to the FCC’s similar stance on political advertising on the TV, conveniently forgetting that it is neither a) the government (the one that’s actually restricted from censorship by freedom of speech) nor b) the increasingly anachronistic technology that is television.
Facebook has been (apparently) trying to combat fake news on its platform since 2015, doing so in classic Silicon Valley iterative design style. It first tried to encourage individual users to flag content as “false news”—an odd half-borrowing from President Trump—then by marking some stories as “disputed,” which, according to what it called “academic” research, backfired by reinforcing some users’ belief in the content. Then, most recently, it was by overlaying the content with a straightforward notice reading: False Information/ Checked by independent fact-checkers. The overlay also provides a prominent CTA to view the fact-checkers’s findings, as well as a secondary button to go ahead and view the false content. At present, there’s still no plan to flag paid political posts as false.
One thing to note is that Facebook started trying to remedy sharing of false information only after it was shared—the original poster was given no alerts to the fact that the content they wanted to share was disputed. The company has amended this in subsequent designs to be more proactive in alerting the original sharer, but it’s still intriguing that the notifications focus on the fact that there’s “additional reporting” on the content.
This strategy focuses on encouraging what we call “curiosity clicks.” This encourages engagement with the information, but that’s also its flaw: You have to care enough that there’s “additional reporting” to click through. As a content designer, I have to wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to name the fact-checkers and pull a significant quote on the content. Snopes, for example, does a great job of highlighting what the specific claim is and giving it a straightforward “true” or “false” (with a range of fuzziness between) rating.
Twitter has taken a rather more straightforward (and cheerworthy) stance of simply not allowing political advertising on its platform. Though as many people have commented, it’s just not that easy. All kinds of misinformation “earns” its way into our feeds daily, a reality that Twitter seems to have done little to nothing to address.
Gig link: https://www.fiverr.com/share/mY4qqx
tools