CoNewsReader: Supporting Comprehensive Understanding and Raising Critical Thoughts on Social Media News Through Comments

TL;DR

CoNewsReader is a novel interactive tool leveraging large language models to enhance critical news reading on social media by integrating comments for better understanding and critical thinking.

Contribution

This paper introduces CoNewsReader, a new comment-based tool that supports comprehensive understanding and critical thinking in social media news reading, powered by large language models.

Findings

Participants using CoNewsReader showed improved news comprehension.

Participants engaged more deeply with news content using CoNewsReader.

CoNewsReader facilitated better critical thinking about social media news.

Abstract

Critical news reading (CNR), which requires grasping the holistic ideas of and raising critical thoughts on the news, is beneficial yet challenging for general people who usually get information on daily social media. Comments under the news can aid CNR by providing complementary information and other readers' diverse and critical thoughts. However, it is under-investigated how to leverage these comments to support users in CNR. In this paper, we first derive user requirements for a comment-based CNR tool from literature and a formative study (N=12). Then, we develop CoNewsReader, a comment-based interactive CNR tool powered by a large language model. CoNewsReader supports users in grasping the news idea with complementary information from comments, filtering useful comments for CNR, and getting questions generated based on the comments to conduct critical thinking. Our within-subjects study with 24 university students indicates that compared to a baseline news reading interface in social media, participants with CoNewsReader have a more engaging CNR experience and perform better on comprehending the news and raising critical thoughts. We discuss design considerations for supporting reading tasks with user- and machine-generated content.