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News Articles on Social Media: Showing Balanced Content Adds More Credibility Than Trust Badges or User Ratings

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Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management (HCII 2023)

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Abstract

Since digital media has become an important vehicle for news consumption, users are inevitably faced with a plethora of different news sources to choose from. Whether or not news is credible is often decided by recognition, intuition, and habits. However, it has become increasingly difficult for users to accurately assess the credibility of news articles. To understand how users evaluate credibility when seeing news on Facebook, we examine the interplay of the opinion of an article with additional credibility cues. To determine their utility, we use a novel conjoint-based research approach. In our experiment (n=178) we study four cues: Facebook reactions, a user rating, an institutional badge, and links to related content. In the last case, this content can either support or contradict the original news. We found that different cues have significantly different effects on credibility evaluation. We see that related content creates higher credibility than the other cues.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our participants for taking part in the study. This work was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia under Grant 005-1709-0006.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RWTH Aachen University, Campus Boulevard 57, 52076, Aachen, Germany

    Patrick Halbach, Laura Burbach & Martina Ziefle

  2. Institute for Multimedia and Interactive Systems, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, Lübeck, 23560, Germany

    André Calero Valdez

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  1. Patrick Halbach
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  2. Laura Burbach
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  4. André Calero Valdez
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Correspondence to André Calero Valdez .

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  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Vincent G. Duffy

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Halbach, P., Burbach, L., Ziefle, M., Calero Valdez, A. (2023). News Articles on Social Media: Showing Balanced Content Adds More Credibility Than Trust Badges or User Ratings. In: Duffy, V.G. (eds) Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14029. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35748-0_31

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