Designing Transparency Cues in Online News Platforms to Promote Trust: Journalists' & Consumers' Perspectives

Abstract

As news organizations embrace transparency practices on their websites to distinguish themselves from those spreading misinformation, HCI designers have the opportunity to help them effectively utilize the ideals of transparency to build trust. How can we utilize transparency to promote trust in news? We examine this question through a qualitative lens by interviewing journalists and news consumers---the two stakeholders in a news system. We designed a scenario to demonstrate transparency features using two fundamental news attributes that convey the trustworthiness of a news article: source and message. In the interviews, our news consumers expressed the idea that news transparency could be best shown by providing indicators of objectivity in two areas (news selection and framing) and by providing indicators of evidence in four areas (presence of source materials, anonymous sourcing, verification, and corrections upon erroneous reporting). While our journalists agreed with news consumers' suggestions of using evidence indicators, they also suggested additional transparency indicators in areas such as the news reporting process and personal/organizational conflicts of interest. Prompted by our scenario, participants offered new design considerations for building trustworthy news platforms, such as designing for easy comprehension, presenting appropriate details in news articles (e.g., showing the number and nature of corrections made to an article), and comparing attributes across news organizations to highlight diverging practices. Comparing the responses from our two stakeholder groups reveals conflicting suggestions with trade-offs between them. Our study has implications for HCI designers in building trustworthy news systems.

“Who Knows? Maybe it Really Works”: Analysing Users' Perceptions of Health Misinformation on Social Media

“…On the basis of previous qualitative studies of users' perceptions of misinformation [15,16,45], we designed and conducted semistructured interviews focusing on participants' encounters with health misinformation (see Figure 1).…”

“Who Knows? Maybe it Really Works”: Analysing Users’ Perceptions of Health Misinformation on Social Media

“…On the basis of previous qualitative studies of users' perceptions of misinformation [15,16,45], we designed and conducted semistructured interviews focusing on participants' encounters with health misinformation (see Figure 1).…”

Navigating misinformation in voice messages: Identification of user‐centered features for digital interventions

“…Addressing policies to encourage media literacy, efforts have been made to develop digital interventions encompassing the user‐centered display of indicators as comprehensible characteristics of misinformation to offer a guidance in autonomous assessment strategies while promoting critical thinking and trust (Bhuiyan et al, 2021). For instance, Bhuiyan et al (2021) take up the idea of indicators by investigating their utilization like information about the author of social media posts from the perspective of journalists and news consumers. Indicators for the credibility of social media posts have been investigated regarding utility and user preferences for visualization, revealing positive feedback as long as the display of indicators was rather simple (Grandhi et al, 2021).…”