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Believability of News

Understanding Users Perceptions of Fake News and the Effectiveness of Fact-Checking Badges

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Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018) (IEA 2018)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 822))

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Abstract

When social media becomes a dominant channel for the distribution of news, manipulation of the news agenda and news content can be achieved by anyone who is hosting a website with access to social media APIs. Falsehoods masked as legitimate news with the intent to manipulate the public are called Fake News. This type of propaganda is disseminated by sharing of individual social media users. Fake news pose a threat to democracies as they influence the public agenda and contribute to polarization of opinions. To limit the dissemination of fake news, social media websites utilize fact-checking badges to flag possibly fabricated content. It has however not been investigated whether these badges are effective and who responds to them. In a survey study with 120 participants we found little evidence for the effectiveness of such badges. However, believability of news in a social media sites were generally rated rather low.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous participants for sharing this intimate data with us and Isabell Busch, Claudia Gerke, Vanessa Götzl, Nicole Kuska and Vivian Lotz for designing the news items and helping with sampling. This research was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The authors thank the German Research Council DFG for the friendly support of the research in the excellence cluster “Integrative Production Technology in High Wage Countries”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human-Computer Interaction Center, RWTH Aachen University, Campus Boulevard 57, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    André Calero Valdez & Martina Ziefle

Authors
  1. André Calero Valdez
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  2. Martina Ziefle
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to André Calero Valdez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Republic of San Marino, San Marino, San Marino

    Sebastiano Bagnara

  2. Centre for Clinical Risk Management and Patient Safety, Tuscany Region, Florence, Italy

    Riccardo Tartaglia

  3. Centre for Clinical Risk Management and Patient Safety, Tuscany Region, Florence, Italy

    Sara Albolino

  4. Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Thomas Alexander

  5. International Ergonomics Association, Tokyo, Japan

    Yushi Fujita

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Calero Valdez, A., Ziefle, M. (2019). Believability of News. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 822. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96077-7_50

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