Designing and Evaluating Presentation Strategies for Fact-Checked Content

With the rapid growth of online misinformation, it is crucial to have reliable fact-checking methods. Recent research on finding check-worthy claims and automated fact-checking have made significant advancements. However, limited guidance exists regarding the presentation of fact-checked content to effectively convey verified information to users. We address this research gap by exploring the critical design elements in fact-checking reports and investigating whether credibility and presentation-based design improvements can enhance users' ability to interpret the report accurately. We co-developed potential content presentation strategies through a workshop involving fact-checking professionals, communication experts, and researchers. The workshop examined the significance and utility of elements such as veracity indicators and explored the feasibility of incorporating interactive components for enhanced information disclosure. Building on the workshop outcomes, we conducted an online experiment involving 76 crowd workers to assess the efficacy of different design strategies. The results indicate that proposed strategies significantly improve users' ability to accurately interpret the verdict of fact-checking articles. Our findings underscore the critical role of effective presentation of fact reports in addressing the spread of misinformation. By adopting appropriate design enhancements, the effectiveness of fact-checking reports can be maximized, enabling users to make informed judgments.Comment: Accepted to the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '23

Online Credibility Testing in Small Organizations: A Case Study of the Global Village Gifts Website

A visitor\u27s perception of the credibility of a website and the organization behind it is a matter of great importance to any business. A theory known as prominence-interpretation theory suggests that users make credibility judgments through a two-step process: 1. The user notices something (Prominence), and 2. The user makes a judgment about it (Interpretation) (Fogg, et al., 2003). With this theory as a basis for support, Heidi Everett (2012) developed a credibility test for small businesses to assess the credibility of their website through a focus group. Global Village Gifts (GVG) is a not-for-profit fair trade store in Logan, UT. Using Everett\u27s study (2012), I utilized a focus group to get feedback on the credibility of GVG\u27s website. Using feedback from the focus group, I redesigned the website with changes to the color, text, and visual elements of the website. Through my research, I learned that a focus group allows a designer to focus on what users wanted to see, rather than using personal judgment to make all decisions regarding design and organization

Perceived Credibility of Information on Internet Health Forums

Internet forums (Yahoo! Answers, Reddit, etc.) have become highly utilized resources that provide informational support on diverse topics. Nearly anyone can contribute information to forums, regardless of their expertise on the topic. Thus, forum users are responsible for evaluating the advice they receive. This raises questions of how information credibility is assessed by users, particularly those seeking health information in forums. There are many explicit and implicit cues that may influence how users evaluate information credibility on health forums, such as spelling accuracy and community star ratings. However, many of these cues have only been examined through interview techniques and not studied experimentally. The present study used the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) as a theoretical framework to explain how forum users evaluated health information under different circumstances. A factorial design was used to examine how perceived credibility of forum advice was affected by community star ratings, the presence or absence of spelling errors, the level of participant involvement, and the context of the severity of the health topic. Results indicated that posts with high star ratings were perceived as significantly more credible than posts with low star ratings, and posts without spelling errors were perceived as significantly more credible than posts with spelling errors. However, results did not support participants’ credibility evaluations of advice through the ELM framework. The lack of support for this framework may have implications for how much effort forum users take to evaluate advice credibility. However, limitations of the study may have played a role in the findings and thus are discussed

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

The paper explains why open source software is an instance of a potentially broader phenomenon. Specifically, I suggest that nonproprietary peer-production of information and cultural materials will likely be a ubiquitous phenomenon in a pervasively networked society. I describe a number of such enterprises, at various stages of the information production value chain. These enterprises suggest that incentives to engage in nonproprietary peer production are trivial as long as enough contributors can be organized to contribute. This implies that the limit on the reach of peer production efforts is the modularity, granularity, and cost of integration of a good produced, not its total cost. I also suggest reasons to think that peer-production can have systematic advantages over both property-based markets and corporate managerial hierarchies as a method of organizing information and cultural production in a networked environment, because it is a better mechanism for clearing information about human capital available to work on existing information inputs to produce new outputs, and because it permits largers sets of agents to use larger sets of resources where there are increasing returns to the scale of both the set of agents and the set of resources available for work on projects. As capital costs and communications costs decrease in importance as factors of information production, the relative advantage of peer production in clearing human capital becomes more salient.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200