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Misinformation poses a threat to democracy and to people’s health. Reliability criteria for news websites can help people identify misinformation. But despite their importance, there has been no empirically substantiated list of criteria for distinguishing reliable from unreliable news websites. We identify reliability criteria, describe how they are applied in practice, and compare them to prior work. Based on our analysis, we distinguish between manipulable and less manipulable criteria and compare politically diverse laypeople as end-users and journalists as expert users. We discuss 11 widely recognized criteria, including the following 6 criteria that are difficult to manipulate: content, political alignment, authors, professional standards, what sources are used, and a website’s reputation. Finally, we describe how technology may be able to support people in applying these criteria in practice to assess the reliability of websites. 

Many people have problems with reading, which limits their ability to participate in society. This paper explores tools that make text more accessible. For this, we interviewed experts, who proposed tools for different stakeholders and scenarios. Important stakeholders of such tools are people with cognitive impairments and non-native readers. Frequently mentioned scenarios are public administration, the medical domain, and everyday life. The tools proposed by experts support stakeholders by improving how text is compressed, expanded, reviewed, and experienced. In a survey of stakeholders, we confirm that the scenarios are relevant and that the proposed tools appear helpful to them. We provide the Accessible Text Framework to help researchers understand how the different tools can be combined and discuss how individual tools can be implemented. The investigation shows that accessible text tools are an important HCI+AI challenge that a large number of people can benefit from. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization provided a checklist to help people distinguish between accurate and misinformation. In controlled experiments in the United States and Germany, we investigated the utility of this ordered checklist and designed an interactive version to lower the cost of acting on checklist items. Across interventions, we observe non-trivial differences in participants’ performance in distinguishing accurate and misinformation between the two countries and discuss some possible reasons that may predict the future helpfulness of the checklist in different environments. The checklist item that provides source labels was most frequently followed and was considered most helpful. Based on our empirical findings, we recommend practitioners focus on providing source labels rather than interventions that support readers performing their own fact-checks, even though this recommendation may be influenced by the WHO’s chosen order. We discuss the complexity of providing such source labels and provide design recommendations.