A Browser Extension for in-place Signaling and Assessment of Misinformation

TL;DR

The paper tackles the problem of misinformation by proposing a platform-agnostic browser extension, Trustnet, that enables users to assess content and surface trusted assessments in-situ across the web. It situates this tool within the spectrum from centralized to democratized moderation and demonstrates its potential through a two-week study with 32 participants, revealing diverse information needs, credibility criteria, and perceived benefits as well as concerns about effort and abuse. The study contributes a taxonomy of credibility indicators, insights into user-driven moderation, and design implications for client-side interventions that empower individuals to curate their own signals of truth. The work underscores the practical significance of enabling personalized, trusted assessments to augment or bypass platform-centric moderation, while acknowledging challenges in scalability, trust, and unintended social consequences.

Abstract

The status-quo of misinformation moderation is a central authority, usually social platforms, deciding what content constitutes misinformation and how it should be handled. However, to preserve users' autonomy, researchers have explored democratized misinformation moderation. One proposition is to enable users to assess content accuracy and specify whose assessments they trust. We explore how these affordances can be provided on the web, without cooperation from the platforms where users consume content. We present a browser extension that empowers users to assess the accuracy of any content on the web and shows the user assessments from their trusted sources in-situ. Through a two-week user study, we report on how users perceive such a tool, the kind of content users want to assess, and the rationales they use in their assessments. We identify implications for designing tools that enable users to moderate content for themselves with the help of those they trust.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: The extension places any available accuracy assessments from the user's trusted or followed sources next to outgoing links on the page the user is visiting. The screenshot shows an example of a red X marking such a link on the Twitter timeline. The link is visually faded because it has been assessed as inaccurate.
• Figure 2: Outgoing links to a Youtube video on the page are displayed with a checkmark icon (marked with blue arrows), indicating that the video has been assessed as accurate by the user's assessors.
• Figure 3: The flow of user interaction with the Trustnet extension, from signing up to assessing and seeing assessments from others.
• Figure 4: The extent to which participants found it important to avoid misinformation on various topics, and how easy they found it to fact-check information related to the topics they reported at least a little important to avoid misinformation on (rating >= 2), on a scale of 1-5. Each user answered these questions only on those topics that they reported they consume.
• Figure 5: The extent to which users reported that they like the ability to assess content in the post-study survey.