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Feedreflect: a Tool for Nudging Users to Assess News Credibility on Twitter

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Feedreflect: a Tool for Nudging Users to Assess News Credibility on Twitter Poster Presentation CSCW’18 Companion, November 3–7, 2018, Jersey City, NJ, USA FeedReflect: A Tool for Nudging Users to Assess News Credibility on Twitter Md Momen Bhuiyan Kexin Zhang Abstract Virginia Tech Georgia Tech In recent years, the emergence of fake news outlets has Blacksburg, VA 24061 Atlanta, GA 30332 drawn out the importance of news literacy. This is particu- [email protected] [email protected] larly 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, peo- Kelsey Vick Michael A. Horning ple oftentimes fail to look skeptically at these stories. We Virginia Tech Virginia Tech explore a way to circumvent this problem by nudging users Blacksburg, VA 24061 Blacksburg, VA 24061 into making conscious assessments of what online contents [email protected] [email protected] 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 Tanushree Mitra in news credibility assessment on Twitter. We recruited a Virginia Tech small number of university students to use this tool on Twit- Blacksburg, VA 24061 ter. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the study [email protected] 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 liter- acy. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or Author Keywords classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation Social Media; News Credibility; User engagement; Reflec- on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. tion; FeedReflect For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’18 Companion, November 3–7, 2018, Jersey City, NJ, USA CCS Concepts ACM 978-1-4503-6018-0/18/11. •Human-centered computing → User centered design; https://doi.org/10.1145/3272973.3274056 205 Poster Presentation CSCW’18 Companion, November 3–7, 2018, Jersey City, NJ, USA Mainstream source ABC News BBC To nudge users about news tweets that require accurate CBS News Introduction “Twitter is honestly my main source of news ... but I feel credibility assessment, we use visual cues such as high- NPR like more recently I am not actually reading the stories as lighting and obscuring tweets. These visual cues act both The Economist much. Because I don’t know. It gets a little repetitive ... So as an element to draw attention and nudge users about the Wall Street Journal sometimes I read headline and I am like that’s enough infor- veracity of the source while they are reading news on Twit- mation.” – Anonymous Twitter user’s response when asked ter. The nudge is followed by engaging them in conscious Table 1: A sample of sources in the mainstream category about her news reading habits on the platform. assessment of the credibility of information. Designs that facilitate reflection have widely been used in the educational Social media platforms, such as, Twitter and Facebook play domain to engage users in any activity [1]. For example, Non-Mainstream source a vital role in information dissemination. Nearly 60% of Twit- one study achieved higher engagement in journaling by 1 Breitbart News ter’s 330 million active users get news on the site . The in- asking users to reflect on past journal entries. Drawing from Drudge Report creasing popularity of Twitter as a news source has also led this research, we use a reflective element, i.e., questions to Info Wars to the emergence of a vast number of outlets disseminat- engage users in news credibility assessment. Project Veritas ing information ranging from carefully vetted news to com- RT pletely fabricated rumors. For example, ABCNews.com.co, FeedReflect The Onion with its striking similarity to the traditional professional me- We developed FeedReflect, a Google Chrome extension dia ABCnews.com, publishes hoax stories, which often go for Twitter, a popular social medium where people con- Table 2: A sample of sources in viral on social media sites. Repeated exposure to false sume news. We intervene on users’ Twitter feeds by high- the non-mainstream category stories originating from these sources could create an il- lighting content that require careful assessment of credi- 2 lusion of truth . This, in essence, challenges the fundamen- bility. First, we emphasize tweets from mainstream news tal value of a democratic society: a well-informed citizenry. sources containing questions in the comments. Then we How can we enable users to be conscious consumers of de-emphasize content from non-mainstream or dubious news on Twitter while preserving their freedom of choice? sources. News content with questions usually refer to less credible news events. We only highlight content from main- In recent years, “nudges,” such as, warnings, reminders, stream sources because it does not make sense to reflect and recommendations, have been used to steer user be- on content from questionable sources. Instead, tweets havior in particular directions, without sacrificing the free- from non-mainstream news sources are dimmed or grayed dom of choice [3]. Scholars have shown that a nudge is out to nudge users into thinking that content from those more effective when it requires conscious or deliberate sources are potentially dubious. The literature on nudges thinking instead of subconscious processing [4]. Research Figure 1: Content highligted due to also suggest that offering specific information pertaining to on information credibility also suggests that warning a user question in the comment the nudge—such as reasoning behind the interventions— about potential misinformation is preferable than correcting can enhance their effect [3]. Therefore, for each visual cue the misinformation. Drawing from these studies, we de- 1 we add a tooltip that explains the reasoning behind the in- http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/ signed a system that facilitates conscious news consump- 26/news-use-across-social-media- tervention. Finally, the system allows the user to reflect on tion by applying a nudge-by-warning cue on tweets and platforms-2016/ those tweets by answering questions pertaining to the cred- 2 requiring reflecting on the information’s credibility. http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/ ibility of the news, thus named FeedReflect. 15/many-americans-believe-fake- news-is-sowing-confusion/ 206 Poster Presentation CSCW’18 Companion, November 3–7, 2018, Jersey City, NJ, USA To maximize the number of users who could use the sys- that it neglects whether the question relates to the news. tem, we developed a tool that is independent of an operat- The nudge comes with a tooltip showing the first comment ing system. A browser extension for Google Chrome can with a question. The goal is to drive the user’s curiosity be used in any Web operating system. After the user in- and encourage exploratory behavior. The second visual stalls the extension, it changes her Twitter feed by applying cue dims content from non-mainstream sources by reduc- appropriate interventions. ing the opacity. Figure 2 shows the intervention in action. Along with dimming, a tooltip explains the reason behind Classifying News Sources this change. In this case, the tweet originates from an al- Mainstream News Source: There is no official definition of ternative media which doesn’t follow standard or ethical mainstream media in the literature. Thus, we used a heuris- journalistic practice. The purpose of the reduced opacity tic approach designed by a journalism and communication- along with the explanatory message is to nudge users into media expert—Michael Horning, a professor from the de- believing that the source is dubious. Figure 2: Content dimmed due to partment of communication, who is also a co-author. Our less credibility of the source expert compiled the list of mainstream news sources by re- Questions to Make Users Reflect: The final component of ferring to the most circulated3 and the most trusted news our system provides questions for the users to reflect on the sources from a Pew survey4, followed by removing two of credibility of the information. Studies show that Gaziano’s the sources, a news aggregator (Google News) and a lo- News Source Credibility Scale is effective in credibility as- cal source (AMNewYork). Our final list comprise sources sessment [2]. Figure 3 shows the questions we used from which generally follow ethical journalistic practices in their this scale. All tweets with visual cues contain a survey but- reporting 5. Table 1 shows a sample. ton at the bottom. When a user clicks on this button, the questions pop up. While answering them, the user need to Non-mainstream News Source: For non-mainstream actively reflect on the news. news sources, we used a curated list created by a research 6 team from Merrimack College . This list organizes sources Result in a taxonomy which includes bias, clickbait, and satire. We To test FeedReflect’s effectiveness in enabling credibility Figure 3: Survey for the purpose removed the “reliable” category from this list as the sources assessment, we recruited 16 university students, equally of reflection in this category were neither well-known nor reported fabri- dividing them into treatment and control groups. The stu- cated content. Table 2 shows a sample of these sources. 3 dents participated in a three week study and used Twitter https://www.cision.com/us/2014/ everyday as they would normally do. The extension ac- 06/top-10-us-daily-newspapers/ Applying the interventions 4 tivated the warning nudge (highlighting and obscuring) http://www.journalism.org/2014/ Visual Cues to Nudge User: We applied two visual cues for the treatment group alone.
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