Keywords

1 Introduction

As technology rapidly develops, the Internet has already enter into worldwide families of millions. The convenient Internet not only brings people information without leaving home, but also makes people easier to send messages to other people: People can easily communicate with others immediately without the constraint of distance through online chart tools, can read current news all over the world at first time when the event occur through web news portals, and can speak their words out letting others see them through social network.

However, as everyone can be the publisher of the information, Internet also brings many rumors and bogus news to people, which look so real that most of us cannot tell the truth. As online information circulate quickly, once a rumor tend to spreads in many people, it is very likely to cause huge losses for people. Thus, we should pay attention to the information credibility problems in the Internet.

Like Facebook and Twitter, Sina Weibo is one of the representative new social media in China. Weibo has the significant influence on Chinese. In June 2015, there exists 212 million monthly active users in Weibo. So it is absolutely an important social platform which can be the source of Internet rumors. In March 3, 2011, Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant leaked because of the big earthquake. In March 16, a fake news claiming the leak had affected China, and iodate salts could prevent the damage spreads on the Internet, particularly in Weibo, in an explosive speed. Most of Internet users believed it, buying iodate salts crazily. The stock around China was insufficient, and it seriously impacted the lives of Chinese. Once a rumor is read by users, it can mislead the truth to another direct, causing damage in many aspects. It is necessary for us to search for a way to assist Internet users in judging online information credibility, particularly in Weibo.

The objective of our research is to propose a method which can guide Internet users to the scientific approach to judging the credibility of information in the Internet according to the content of information, and develop an assistant webpage with the method based on Weibo, and conduct an experiment to verify the effectiveness of the method and the usability of the website.

2 Judgment Process, Criterions and Cues in Judgment

Information credibility is what degree a person believe the information is true when receiving it. It is content-based, but different from different people and different environment, and easily affected by kinds of reasons.

2.1 Judgment Process

Before people judging the credibility of online information, they generally make sure the topic of the information is interesting for them [1]. They begin the judging process in judge whether the website providing the information is authoritative and credible [2]. People continue the credibility judging process only if they trust on the platform. Rather than accuracy, people usually expect more efficiency when judging credibility [3], and people have limited capacity in mind [4]. Thus people will not spend much time on it, but prefer to use a small part of information they have, such as words, pictures and other cues, [5] for judging in terms of some heuristic including reputation, endorsement, consistency, expectancy violation and persuasive heuristic [6] and one or two criterions [7] from usefulness, completeness, accuracy, currency, and importance. [8] Consequently, people sometimes cannot do a correct judgment to an information.

If the motivation for judging is not enough for getting conclusion, people will give up. Even if people have their own conclusion, because of the shortage of process, there may be the misjudgment about judging information credibility.

2.2 Judging Criterions

Metzger reviewed current recommendations helping people judge credibility of information, and evaluated the existing cognitive models for credibility assessment, and provided the future online credibility education and practice [7]. He suggested five criterions for judging process including accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage. However, Internet users always follow accuracy, authority, objectivity and coverage, but ignore currency. When the time and energy for assessment are limited, they will just use two in five criterions, e.g., accuracy and coverage, and even use only one criterion for the final decision. When user judge the credibility, they are always partial to beautiful interface. For assisting users, we can emphasize criterions that are easier to be ignored for them.

Table 1 is the criterions with its details and definitions.

Table 1. Judging criterions in the process of information credibility assessment [7, 9]
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2.3 Judging Cues

Schwarz and Morris suggested that providing for Internet users some cues that can supporting to evaluate the credibility of online text was useful and valuable [10]. Castillo, Mendoza and Problete classified cues that influence people’s judgment of online information credibility into information contents, information sources, topics, and information dissemination [11]. In addition, Flanagin and Metzger considered that visual styles of information also intensively affected the assessing of credibility, [12] and Fogg even believed that the influence of visual styles was more important than information content and source [3].

Information Contents:

Properties related only to the content of information, including misspelling, misuse of grammar and punctuation, reference of literature or data, professional and clear content, understandability, reasonability, advertisement, URL, tags, and so on [7, 10, 13].

Information Sources:

Properties about the publishing sites and author of online information. For sites, there are many cues that can affect the credibility of information it publishing, including visitor volume, wining prizes, ranking, official, domain type, and simple navigation, structural websites, notification of review from editor, interaction function (search, information confirming, prompt response for user service), reputation [7]. The cues about author influencing the judgment are gender, geographic location, active degree, expert in topic area, officially proving, and contact details [13, 14]. Specially, in social platform, the head portrait, followers and followees are also important for users assessing the credibility [13, 15].

Topics:

The topic about the information content and its properties. Currencyis the most obvious cues of topic [7].

Information Dissemination:

Description of how the information dissemination. Popularity in experts, visitor volume classified by geographic location, in the front of the list of search results, sharing times are all the properties [10, 13].

Visual Styles:

Properties of the ways the information visually present to users, independent with other properties of information itself. Personalizing homepage, [13] professional, attractive, consistent design of sites is included in visual styles.

Table 2 shows affecting cues about online information credibility.

Table 2. Cues in the process of information credibility assessment
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3 Expert Interviewing

Considering the importance of motivation and people are usually interested in news, in order to make sure which criterions and cues have positive effects on judging outcome, and to add some criterions and cues that may not be mentioned in literatures, interviews with expert in judging credibility of news information were conducted.

3.1 Interview Process

Participants:

Five experts in news information credibility assessment, including four Chinese editors of newspapers and one Journalism professor from Tongji University, three male and two female. One editor works for academic journal of Beijing Institute of Technology, and two works for daily news now, one has worked for daily news. They are occupied in jobs related to news, and are all experienced in the credibility about news information.

Interview Questions:

Including some open end explorative questions about experts’ experience in news credibility assessment, and a questionnaire inquiring the experts’ ranking for the positive effect on five criterions and five cues mentioned above. Main aspects of questions were experts’ opinions about online news information credibility, the judging process expert usually use in their work, the properties of fake news, and how to help general people assess online news credibility. And in the questionnaire, the 7-point Likert scales were used to measure different levels of agreement to the positive effect of items including criterions and cues from “1 = totally disagree” to “7 = totally agree”. The definition of items were provided in the questionnaire.

Procedure:

One interview was conducted face to face, and other four interviews was conducted by online video chatting. The interview time for each participant was 40 ~ 90 min. We first asked open questions to experts about their works and specific cases for judging news credibility they had experienced, then let them fill in the questionnaire about useful criterions and cues.

3.2 Interview Results

Properties of Online News:

Compared to news on traditional media, online news cares more about ‘new’, and is required to be faster by people. At the same time, the examine steps of online news is simpler and fewer than traditional news. Even so, official news is still more credible than we media on the Internet. Judging credibility of online news only in terms of content is extremely difficult for everyone.

Types of Fake News:

There are three different fake news. The first one is completely fake news, representing the news whose content is absolutely fake, such as the medicine that guarantee to cure all diseases. The second fake news is partial fake news, representing the news that contain true part and fake part, which are common on the Internet. The third fake news is bias news. The bias news include no fake part, but hide some fact or enlarge some fact in content. It is the type of majority fake news, causing most damage to people.

Suggestions to Internet Users:

Do not easily believe online news. Source, experts’ opinion and integrity of news are all important for credible news. The news whose related news are from only one source is not credible.

Revise of Criterions:

According to the questionnaire data, items that mean value of point are greater than 4 and variance of point are small are keep. Useful criterions includes accuracy, authority and objectivity.

Revise of Cues:

According to the questionnaire data, items that mean value of point are greater than 4 and variance of point are small are keep. Useful type of cues were information contents, information sources, topics and information dissemination.

4 Assistant Webpage Tool Design

An assistant webpage is designed to help people assess online news in Weibo. The webpage is developed by Python, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and HTML, visualizing the useful cues to Weibo users. Figure 1 illustrates a part of webpage.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

The overall design of the assistant webpage

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According to the different types of cues, the assistant webpage is divided into three parts, presenting information contents and sources, information spread, and topics. Every part is constituted by different functional pieces, and each functional piece visualizes different cues respectively.

Table 3 shows the structure of webpage with affecting cues.

Table 3. The structure and content of the assistant webpage
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4.1 First Part: Information Contents and Sources Part

First part contained the information contents and sources assistance. And this part is design as familiar with Weibo as possible considering the consistency for users.

There are two functional pieces in the first part. The left piece presents the content of Weibo news and information of its author, including author’s head portrait, followers, followees, numbers of weibos, active degree and related field, showed by the rate of sending weibos and keyword of author’s weibos. The right piece presents the means of terms in news content from Wiki, helping users understand the news.

4.2 Second Part: Information Dissemination Part

Second part of assistant webpage contained the information dissemination of Weibo news. The spread is by ‘retransmit weibos’ function, like retweet in Twitter.

The second part also contains two functional pieces. The left piece is the timeline of key retransmission of the Weibo news, called retransmission timeline. Hot retransmissions from officially proving users and their identity in Weibo are presented ordering by time, gathering the experts’ opinion in it. Figure 2 shows the details of retransmission timeline piece.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

The timeline functional piece in the second part of the assistant webpage

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The right functional piece is the cloud of hot words of all the retransmission by Weibo users. It contains the words that are mostly mentioned in retransmission, and displays the content of related retransmission when clicking a word. The cloud of hot words represent the opinion of general users in spreading process. Figure 3 is the details of the piece.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

The cloud of key words functional piece in the second part of the assistant webpage

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4.3 Third Part: Topics Part

Third part of assistant webpage shows the cross-platform relevant news about the same topics. It has two functional pieces presenting relevant news in Weibo and at other news websites respectively.

5 Conclusion

In this study, a method of helping the Internet users judge the credibility of online news information was proposed through literature reviewing and interviews with experts in news credibility assessment. The method contained a judgment process, three judging criterions and four affecting cues. The judgment process described how people thought in the process of credibility assessment: People firstly judged the credibility of sources, then selected several elements in the information; according to the elements people conducted the assessment and finally got the results; moreover, judging process observed the interest-driving rules, considering efficiency but not accuracy. The judging criterions which had positive effects on assessment included accuracy, authority and objectivity. And the four types of positive affecting cues are information contents, information sources, relevant news of the topic and information spread, every type contained several small cues.

An assistant webpage based on Weibo, helping online users judge the credibility of the news information by visualizing the positive affecting cues in the method, was designed. The first part of the webpage showed the content and source information in Weibo, adding the explanation of terms in the content. And the second part visualizing the news spread information, containing the timeline of the experts’ opinion and the cloud of the general users’ hot word in the retransmission of the Weibo news. The third part gathered the relevant news in Weibo and added the news in official online news media.

There were three main limitations in the study. Firstly, we had just verified the effectiveness of the method in Weibo news. The initial object of the research was to get a method that could help Internet users for the process of all the online information credibility assessment, and the method was conducted to help people judging online news in all the Internet website, and the webpage was applied only for Weibo. In other words, the assisting range was narrow. Secondly, the webpage only visualized the affecting cues of the method, but without the judging criterions, which were just used to test the assistant effects. At last, the effects of the assistant webpage had not been measured. The future study can concentrate on expanding the applying range of the method, visualizing the judging criterions in the method, and improving the design of the assistant webpage.