Woke | Devpost

In this digital era, the development and availability of many different social media platforms has facilitated rapid dissemination of information. While such platforms are incredibly useful for reaching a greater audience to promote certain messages or share news, it has also become easier to spread false information. Moreover, it has been reported that information which appear to be novel and easier to process are often perceived to be real and have been reported to be 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. With repeated exposure to false information, this becomes a vicious cycle, causing users to subconsciously develop a sense of familiarity and acceptance. To address this, we planned to develop a web/mobile-based social media application to help users discern the truth from false information posted on social media. We decided to use the slang “Woke” as the name of our app as it reflects our ambition to increase social awareness. As we recognize that readability and ease of use are important for attracting users, we created a simple system which consists of displaying a brief statement obtained from social media that is easy to digest and a swipe function that allows users to share their perception by choosing true (tick) or false (cross). After each decision is made, the number of votes for each option from the general public and the correctness of the user’s response are revealed, along with a brief description that seeks to educate users and improve their understanding of social topics. To incentivise users and encourage long-term usage, we also implemented a “woke” system which rewards users points based on correct responses. After each response, the cumulative “woke” score of users are updated and reflected as a star rating which users can also share on social media. This aims to not only allow users to feel a greater sense of achievement, but also encourages others to use the application to conform, thereby creating a positive feedback loop which aims to promote greater social awareness (wokeness). With a star rating for each user’s profile, this helps the public to get an idea of which users are more trustworthy and credible sources of information. We built our web/mobile-based social media application with React JS and Heroku. While we spent a great amount of time in the initial planning stage of the project in terms of what technology we would use for front-end and back-end development, we eventually realised that time constraint is the biggest challenge. As a result, we decided to invest more time in front-end development. Overall, this was a valuable experience for all of us, learning how to collaborate and understanding the stages of product creation, from planning to developing a prototype.