Enhancing social media platforms with additional context to improve misinformation recognition

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In recent years, misinformation has emerged as a critical digital threat affecting the trustworthiness of online content. Plenty of research has focused on automating the detection of misinformation. However, misinformation still gets through, and people still have to decide about the veracity of the consumed content. The problem is that people are not good in recognising misinformation. Different approaches have been studied to address this problem, which include the use of indicators to notify users about credibility of the source of an article or interventions to teach people to recognise misinformation. However, these approaches are not always successful and other methods need to be investigated to improve misinformation recognition.Thus, the goal of this project is to study: (i) what additional context could be added to social media platforms so that users become better at recognising misinformation, and (ii) how information (including the additional context) could be better presented to help social media users make better decisions about the consumed content. The project will study the effectiveness of various types of additional context, including information that is retrieved from other platforms. We may use innovative visualisations to design user interfaces that are better suited to help social media users recognise misinformation.