NudgeCred: Supporting News Credibility Assessment on Social Media Through Nudges

TL;DR

NudgeCred is a browser extension that uses nudges to help Twitter users better assess the credibility of news tweets, effectively improving their ability to distinguish credible from questionable news.

Contribution

This work introduces NudgeCred, a novel nudge-based system combining heuristic cues to enhance online news credibility judgments on social media.

Findings

NudgeCred significantly improved users' ability to distinguish news credibility.

Participants showed increased attention to credibility cues, especially towards questionable news.

The system was effective regardless of users' political beliefs or skepticism.

Abstract

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.