Courage

This project aims to develop a Social Media User's Virtual Companion that educates and supports teenage school students facing the treats of social media such as discrimination and biases also escalating to hate speech, bullying, fake news and other toxic content that can strongly affect the real world.

The Companion will raise awareness of potential threats in social media while still providing a satisfactory experience through the use of novel gamification strategies and educative information selection algorithms. Using hand defined gamification strategies based on the concept of interactive counter-narrative together with a learnt model of diffusion of biased, hateful and general toxic content on the social media, the companion will bootstrap learning of strategies for interaction and information selection.

These strategies will be refined and personalized for each user and his social niche with the dual aims of (A) improving and creating healthy social relationships between the user, his peers and the targets of bias, as well as(B) increasing their understanding of the social effects of toxic content in social media and the user role in its propagation.

Experimentation will use data mined from real social media and re-enact them for testing in restricted and controllable conditions (eg. schools, classes).