Supporting credibility assessment of news in social media using star ratings and alternate sources

Abstract

© 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). This paper reports findings from a preliminary experiment in which we designed and tested two interface augmentations for enhancing credibility judgments of news stories on Facebook. We find that users’ credibility judgments can be improved by the two augmentations, though the changes in credibility scores were not statistically significant. However, participants spent longer using the design that gave them control over the evaluation process, and they appeared to be more confident about their choices when using it—despite the fact that their judgments were actually less accurate. We outline directions for future work based on these findings.