VSAS : Visual Selective Attention System for Sharing Misinformation Awareness

Headed by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nazlena Binti Mohamad Ali.

Geran Penyelidikan Khas Top Down UKM: Penyelidikan IR4.0

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a truly challenge to the stability of global human life.  Misinformation issues on social media are one of the challenges. Sharing information in social media should be carried out with responsibility and false information (misinformation) is not forwarded. Sharing misinformation can cause a bad influence on people’s beliefs, which ultimately results in a lot of losses. Little research has been carried out from preventing the behavior for sharing misinformation. The objective of this research is to create an intervention into misinformation sharing behavior, primarily in the aspect of attentive information-sharing in COVID-19 outbreaks. The aim is to raise attention and awareness that can cause detrimental losses such as falsehood of public health misinformation, panic buying by the issue of regional lockdown, the distrust of guidance from health experts, economic incentives behind pharmaceutical goods claims for prevention and healing, and the disruption of state security stability.  The study proposed a Visual Selective Attention System (VSAS) that applied the principle of visual selective attention theory. VSAS is a prototype interface design that can be formed in any social media application using identified visual techniques such as a spotlight and zoom-lens through crowd intelligence-based detection. The research methodology applied in this study is based on ecological experiments through three classes of target users; young, middle, and older adults. The contributions of this study are to produce continuous knowledge, lead to noncoercive handling of sharing misinformation behavior, and lay the basis for overcoming misinformation issues through applying visual selective attention, specifically related to COVID-19 misinformation.