Account Verification's Effect on Tweet Credibility
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Does Being Verified Make You More Credible? Account Verification’s Effect on Tweet Credibility Tavish Vaidya Daniel Votipka Georgetown University University of Maryland Michelle L. Mazurek Micah Sherr University of Maryland Georgetown University ABSTRACT Verification’s Effect on Tweet Credibility. In CHI Conference on Many popular social networking and microblogging sites Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4– support verified accounts—user accounts that are deemed of 9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. public interest and whose owners have been authenticated https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300755 by the site. Importantly, the content of messages contributed by verified account owners is not verified. Such messages 1 INTRODUCTION may be factually correct, or not. On many social networking and microblogging sites, it is This paper investigates whether users confuse authenticity no longer the case that nobody knows you’re a dog [43]. with credibility by posing the question: Are users more likely Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, and other popular sites to believe content from verified accounts than from non-verified support verified accounts—accounts whose owners have been accounts? We conduct two online studies, a year apart, with authenticated by the site [48].1 Verified accounts are often 748 and 2041 participants respectively, to assess how the reserved for well-known organizations and individuals, and presence or absence of verified account indicators influences are indicated with a badge (e.g., ) that appears next to the users’ perceptions of tweets. Surprisingly, across both stud- account holder’s name (see Figure 1a). Verified accounts ies, we find that—in the context of unfamiliar accounts—most are intended to allow users to easily distinguish between users can effectively distinguish between authenticity and authentic accounts of public interest and those belonging to credibility. The presence or absence of an authenticity indi- parody accounts or impostors. cator has no significant effect on willingness to share atweet Importantly, accounts earn verified status by being authen- or take action based on its contents. ticated (i.e., the user is who she claims to be). Sites specifically do not assess an account owner’s trustworthiness when as- CCS CONCEPTS signing verified status, and most major online community • Information systems → Social networks; Trust; • Se- sites do not require that verified account owners post only curity and privacy → Authentication; Human and societal factual content. More plainly, posts from a verified account aspects of security and privacy. may be factual, or not [11]. This paper examines whether users conflate authenticity KEYWORDS with credibility, in the context of microblogging sites such as Social; Twitter; Credibility; Trust; Authentication Twitter. That is, are users more likely to believe, and there- ACM Reference Format: fore be willing to act upon, messages that originate from Tavish Vaidya, Daniel Votipka, Michelle L. Mazurek, and Micah verified accounts? We define credibility as the “believability” Sherr. 2019. Does Being Verified Make You More Credible? Account of a piece of information—that is, the degree to which it influences whether an individual is persuaded to adopt the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for opinion offered and take action accordingly24 [ ]. Indicators personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that of authenticity (such as a verified account badge) signal that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights a message originated from its purported source. Credible for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must information may of course stem from both verified and un- be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or verified accounts; conversely, the same is true for incorrect republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific information. Equating credibility with authenticity is thus a permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK logical fallacy. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 1The terminology can vary slightly among sites; for example, Facebook ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05...$15.00 uses the term “verified profile.” For consistency, we refer to accounts whose https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300755 authenticity has been confirmed by site operators as verified accounts. Three significant factors suggest that verified badges could verified account owners (and their posted content) should influence people’s perceptions of user-generated content. Lit- be considered trustworthy.2 erature from psychology and other social sciences shows that The implications of users conflating authenticity with cred- perceptions of credibility are more influenced by the source ibility are worrisome. With the growing fraction of people of information than by its credulity [6, 14, 17, 21, 45]. No- who use online social media (with user-generated content) as tably, Hovland et al. found that the credibility of a message their primary source of news [2] and the recent proliferation is influenced by the source, setting, and presentation ofar- of fake news [54], a possible inability to judge the credibil- guments of the message along with receivers’ predisposition ity of information from (un)verified accounts is especially toward the message [24, pg. 10-13]. Berlo et al. found that the disconcerting. message’s source affects message credibility along three axes: To understand the effect of account verification onthe safety, or whether the recipient believes the source might credibility of user-generated content, we conducted two stud- have an agenda or a reason to mislead; qualification, or how ies on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk comparing participants’ qualified the source is to comment on the given topic; anddy- perceived credibility of tweets from verified and unverified namism, or how charismatic and persuasive the author is [3]. accounts. In both the studies, we varied factors such as the If information is widely endorsed (e.g., popularly “liked” on subject matter of tweets, the advertised credentials of the Twitter) and/or originates from a well-known source (e.g., poster, the positivity/negativity of tweets towards their sub- a verified account), then the prior work suggests users will ject matter, and the indicators used to signify that an account perceive it as more trustworthy (i.e., safe) and the author as was verified (e.g., a icon vs. a textual “Verified account” more qualified, leading to higher perceived credibility. label). We measured perceived credibility both implicitly, by Second, the computer security community has repeatedly asking about actionability, and explicitly, by asking directly shown that users have difficulty in understanding the con- about the effect of the authenticity indicator. cept of authenticity [1, 8, 13, 46] and are generally confused Surprisingly, the results of Study 1 (n1=748, conducted in by security indicators [20, 40]. In particular, users do not Aug-Sep 2017) showed no evidence of correlation between easily distinguish between authenticity and integrity. For verified account status (i.e., verified or unverified) andthe example, users have been shown to believe the content of perceived credibility of tweets. To validate the null result, we websites so long as browser indicators (e.g., the golden lock) conducted a second study (Study 2, n2=2041, Aug-Sept 2018) show that the website is secure [13]. This suggests that users that confirmed our initial findings from Study 1. In this paper, might mistake verified account badges as an external vali- for brevity, we primarily discuss the second study. (Results dation that the posted content has been fact-checked. This from the first study are provided as supplementary mate- effect could potentially be boosted by the iconography of rial.) As detailed in the next section, these findings directly verified account badges (e.g., Twitter’s and Facebook’s ). contradict results from prior work [35, 51]. Finally, the manner in which accounts become verified has led to confusion. In particular, Twitter verifies accounts only 2 RELATED WORK when it deems the account owner to be of public interest [48]. Researchers have long sought to understand the factors that This has translated into a perception that authenticity indi- influence users’ perceptions of online content. Wineburg et cators are markers of prestige and importance, not merely al. [53] survey students to assess whether they can correctly authenticity. Twitter has been criticized for granting verified judge the credibility of information from online sources. account status to racists and other extremists [52]. (Here, the Fogg et al. [15] conduct a notable, large-scale study in which criticism is not that these extremists are not who they say more than 2600 participants reviewed websites for credi- they are, but rather that their accounts have earned “elite” bility. They find that the “design look” (i.e., user interface) status.) Twitter responded to this criticism by noting that of a site is the most frequent (and dominating) factor in “[v]erification was meant to authenticate identity &voice determining its credibility. However,