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How people investigate -- or don't -- fake news on Twitter and Facebook

4 years ago
Anonymous $9CO2RSACsf

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200318200046.htm

Researchers at the University of Washington wanted to know how people investigated potentially suspicious posts on their own feeds. The team watched 25 participants scroll through their Facebook or Twitter feeds while, unbeknownst to them, a Google Chrome extension randomly added debunked content on top of some of the real posts. Participants had various reactions to encountering a fake post: Some outright ignored it, some took it at face value, some investigated whether it was true, and some were suspicious of it but then chose to ignore it. These results have been accepted to the 2020 ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

"We wanted to understand what people do when they encounter fake news or misinformation in their feeds. Do they notice it? What do they do about it?" said senior author Franziska Roesner, a UW associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "There are a lot of people who are trying to be good consumers of information and they're struggling. If we can understand what these people are doing, we might be able to design tools that can help them."