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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The Effects of AI-based Credibility Indicators on the Detection and Spread of Misinformation under Social Influence
Misinformation on social media has become a serious concern. Marking news stories with credibility indicators, possibly generated by an AI model, is one way to help people combat misinformation. In this paper, we report the results of two randomized experiments that aim to understand the effects of AI-based credibility indicators on people's perceptions of and engagement with the news, when people are under social influence such that their judgement of the news is influenced by other people. We find that the presence of AI-based credibility indicators nudges people into aligning their belief in the veracity of news with the AI model's prediction regardless of its correctness, thereby changing people's accuracy in detecting misinformation. However, AI-based credibility indicators show limited impacts on influencing people's engagement with either real news or fake news when social influence exists. Finally, it is shown that when social influence is present, the effects of AI-based credibility indicators on the detection and spread of misinformation are larger as compared to when social influence is absent, when these indicators are provided to people before they form their own judgements about the news. We conclude by providing implications for better utilizing AI to fight misinformation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850335
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10434454
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 27
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3555562
