Enable people to identify science news based on retracted articles on social media

TL;DR

This study investigates how an augmented social media interface can help users identify and consider retracted scientific articles, thereby improving their ability to assess the credibility of health news on social media.

Contribution

It introduces an augmented interface that provides retraction information and demonstrates its effectiveness in helping users recognize scientific retractions during news evaluation.

Findings

Participants using the augmented interface considered retraction more often.

The interface improved users' ability to judge credibility based on retraction info.

Insights into how retraction understanding influences misinformation detection.

Abstract

For many people, social media is an important way to consume news on important topics like health. Unfortunately, some influential health news is misinformation because it is based on retracted scientific work. Ours is the first work to explore how people can understand this form of misinformation and how an augmented social media interface can enable them to make use of information about retraction. We report a between subjects think-aloud study with 44 participants, where the experimental group used our augmented interface. Our results indicate that this helped them consider retraction when judging the credibility of news. Our key contributions are foundational insights for tackling the problem, revealing the interplay between people's understanding of scientific retraction, their prior beliefs about a topic, and the way they use a social media interface that provides access to retraction information.