Viblio: Introducing Credibility Signals and Citations to Video-Sharing Platforms
Emelia Hughes, Renee Wang, Prerna Juneja, Tony Li, Tanu Mitra, Amy Zhang
TL;DR
This work addresses the lack of credible signals for video content on platforms like YouTube and the consequent vulnerability to misinformation. It combines a contextual inquiry with a prototype extension, Viblio, to crowdsource and display citations tied to video timestamps, thereby enabling lateral reading and richer context during viewing. Through an extended user study, Viblio is shown to be intuitive and helpful for developing credibility judgments, especially in educational and controversial domains, while also highlighting risks of misuse and the need for moderation. The findings offer a path toward user-centered credibility tools that complement existing signals and have potential applications in education and critical media literacy, with considerations for scalability and platform integration.
Abstract
As more users turn to video-sharing platforms like YouTube as an information source, they may consume misinformation despite their best efforts. In this work, we investigate ways that users can better assess the credibility of videos by first exploring how users currently determine credibility using existing signals on platforms and then by introducing and evaluating new credibility-based signals. We conducted 12 contextual inquiry interviews with YouTube users, determining that participants used a combination of existing signals, such as the channel name, the production quality, and prior knowledge, to evaluate credibility, yet sometimes stumbled in their efforts to do so. We then developed Viblio, a prototype system that enables YouTube users to view and add citations and related information while watching a video based on our participants' needs. From an evaluation with 12 people, all participants found Viblio to be intuitive and useful in the process of evaluating a video's credibility and could see themselves using Viblio in the future.