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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. 

As news organizations embrace transparency practices on their websites to distinguish themselves from those spreading misinformation, HCI designers have the opportunity to help them effectively utilize the ideals of transparency to build trust. How can we utilize transparency to promote trust in news? We examine this question through a qualitative lens by interviewing journalists and news consumers---the two stakeholders in a news system. We designed a scenario to demonstrate transparency features using two fundamental news attributes that convey the trustworthiness of a news article: source and message. In the interviews, our news consumers expressed the idea that news transparency could be best shown by providing indicators of objectivity in two areas (news selection and framing) and by providing indicators of evidence in four areas (presence of source materials, anonymous sourcing, verification, and corrections upon erroneous reporting). While our journalists agreed with news consumers' suggestions of using evidence indicators, they also suggested additional transparency indicators in areas such as the news reporting process and personal/organizational conflicts of interest. Prompted by our scenario, participants offered new design considerations for building trustworthy news platforms, such as designing for easy comprehension, presenting appropriate details in news articles (e.g., showing the number and nature of corrections made to an article), and comparing attributes across news organizations to highlight diverging practices. Comparing the responses from our two stakeholder groups reveals conflicting suggestions with trade-offs between them. Our study has implications for HCI designers in building trustworthy news systems. 

Rampant fake news on social media has drawn significant attention. Yet, much remains unknown as to how such imbalanced evaluations of self versus others could shape social media users’ perceptions and their subsequent attitudes and behavioral intentions regarding social media news. An online survey ( N = 335) was conducted to examine the third person effect (TPE) in fake news on social media and suggested that users perceived a greater influence of fake news on others than on themselves. However, although users evaluated fake news as socially undesirable, they were still unsupportive of government censorship as a remedy. In addition, the perceived prevalence of fake news leads audiences to reported significantly less willingness to share all news on social media either online or offline. 

The inverted pyramid is a basic structure of news reporting used by journalists to convey information and it is considered a key element of objectivity in news reporting. In this article, we propose the Inverted Pyramid Scoring method to evaluate how well a news article follows the inverted pyramid structure using main event descriptors (5W1H) extraction and news summarization. We evaluate our proposed method on a proprietary data set of Associated Press news articles across breaking and non-breaking news spanning two topics—political and business. Our results show that the method works at distinguishing the structural differences between breaking and non-breaking news. In particular, our results confirm that breaking news articles are more likely to follow the inverted pyramid structure. 

The inverted pyramid is a basic structure of news reporting used by journalists to convey information and it is considered a key element of objectivity in news reporting. In this article, we propose the Inverted Pyramid Scoring method to evaluate how well a news article follows the inverted pyramid structure using main event descriptors (5W1H) extraction and news summarization. We evaluate our proposed method on a proprietary data set of Associated Press news articles across breaking and non-breaking news spanning two topics—political and business. Our results show that the method works at distinguishing the structural differences between breaking and non-breaking news. In particular, our results confirm that breaking news articles are more likely to follow the inverted pyramid structure. 

In recent years, the emergence of fake news outlets has drawn out the importance of news literacy. This is particularly critical in social media where the flood of information makes it difficult for people to assess the veracity of the false stories from such deceitful sources. Therefore, people oftentimes fail to look skeptically at these stories. We explore a way to circumvent this problem by nudging users into making conscious assessments of what online contents are credible. For this purpose, we developed FeedReflect, a browser extension. The extension nudges users to pay more attention and uses reflective questions to engage in news credibility assessment on Twitter. We recruited a small number of university students to use this tool on Twitter. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the study suggests the extension helped people accurately assess the credibility of news. This implies FeedReflect can be used for the broader audience to improve online news literacy.