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There is growing concern regarding adolescent online risks posed by social media. Prior work calls for a paradigm shift from restrictive approaches towards strength-based solutions to online safety, that provide autonomy and control to teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, we must include teens as partners in the design and evaluation of online safety solutions. To address this gap, my first dissertation study focused on co-designing online safety features with teens, which showed that teens often design real-time interventions that resemble "nudges". Therefore, my dissertation focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of these nudge designs in an ecologically valid social media simulation. To do this, I will conduct three studies: 1) a User Experience Bootcamp with teens to teach them design skills for co-designing online safety features, 2) a focus group study to design an ecologically valid social media simulation, 3) a between-subjects experiment within a social media simulation for evaluating the effect of nudges in educating teens and helping them make safer choices when exposed to risk. My goal for this research is to understand, design, develop, and evaluate online safety nudges that can help promote self-regulated, autonomous, and safer interactions for teens online.
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NudgeCred: Supporting News Credibility Assessment on Social Media Through Nudges
Struggling to curb misinformation, social media platforms are experimenting with design interventions to enhance consumption of credible news on their platforms. Some of these interventions, such as the use of warning messages, are examples of nudges---a choice-preserving technique to steer behavior. Despite their application, we do not know whether nudges could steer people into making conscious news credibility judgments online and if they do, under what constraints. To answer, we combine nudge techniques with heuristic based information processing to design NudgeCred--a browser extension for Twitter. NudgeCred directs users' attention to two design cues: authority of a source and other users' collective opinion on a report by activating three design nudges---Reliable, Questionable, and Unreliable, each denoting particular levels of credibility for news tweets. In a controlled experiment, we found that NudgeCred significantly helped users (n=430) distinguish news tweets' credibility, unrestricted by three behavioral confounds---political ideology, political cynicism, and media skepticism. A five-day field deployment with twelve participants revealed that NudgeCred improved their recognition of news items and attention towards all of our nudges, particularly towards Questionable. Among other considerations, participants proposed that designers should incorporate heuristics that users' would trust. Our work informs nudge-based system design approaches for online media.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2041068
- PAR ID:
- 10323201
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3479571
