Infinite scrolling on social media platforms is designed to encourage prolonged engagement, leading users to spend more time than desired, which can provoke negative emotions.
Interventions to mitigate infinite scrolling have shown initial success, yet users become desensitized due to the lack of contextual relevance.
Understanding how contextual factors influence intervention effectiveness remains underexplored.
We conducted a 7-day user study (N=72) investigating how these contextual factors affect users' reactance and responsiveness to interventions during infinite scrolling.
Our study revealed an interplay, with contextual factors such as being at home, sleepiness, and valence playing significant roles in the intervention's effectiveness. Low valence coupled with being at home slows down the responsiveness to interventions, and sleepiness lowers reactance towards interventions, increasing user acceptance of the intervention.
Overall, our work contributes to a deeper understanding of user responses toward interventions and paves the way for developing more effective interventions during infinite scrolling.
In the digital information ecosystem, clicks serve as a crucial gateway to fact-checking, yet the essential challenge extends beyond this to fostering cognitive shifts that update entrenched false beliefs. This study investigates effective interventions aimed at encouraging users vulnerable to misinformation, particularly those who tend to avoid incongruent facts, to examine their false beliefs. We conducted an online experiment with 627 participants, comparing metacognitive and ranking interventions. Both interventions successfully improved click behavior, with the metacognitive intervention increasing belief-examining clicks by 14 percentage points and the ranking intervention by 33 percentage points. However, only the metacognitive intervention significantly promoted users' examination of misinformation. This finding underscores the importance of interventions that go beyond merely influencing easily measurable clicks to facilitating thoughtful engagement with fact-checking content. We discuss implications for designing strategies to enhance online fact-checking engagement and mitigate misinformation's societal impact.
Much work in HCI has investigated strategies for supporting autonomous self-regulation in social media use (SMU): helping users to control their time online and ensure it serves personally valued outcomes.
However, results suggest that the effectiveness and acceptability of these strategies may vary based on individual needs. Recent work has attributed this variation to motivational factors, though we currently lack data to understand how these factors influence self-regulation, user experience and well-being.
We draw on Self-Determination Theory to analyse autonomous and non-autonomous patterns of motivation in 521 users of social media.
Using latent profile analysis, we identify 4 ``motivational profiles'' associated with significant differences in need satisfaction, affect, and compulsive engagement.
Our results clarify distinct aspects of autonomy in SMU and identify opportunities to target and personalise design interventions; they suggest autonomous regulation can be associated with better experience and well-being, though not necessarily less time online.
This study aims to investigate the dynamics of young adults' food practices within the interplay between technology and tradition by employing a Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) approach as an analytical lens. We conducted surveys and interviews with young adults. This is complemented by a workshop involving design and gastronomy experts. Grounded in Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) and encompassing 38 core values and resulting in five value conflicts. Our analysis highlights five prominent themes: “Preservation of Culinary Heritage and Relationships”, “Technological Convenience”, “Uniqueness and Personalisation”, “Globalised Nature of Food”, and “Sustainable Choices and Trustworthiness”. By bridging between Human-Food Interaction (HFI) and VSD realms, this study provides insights for researchers, designers, and practitioners. The value-laden analytical perspective of the findings sheds light on the food practices of the young generation, for future HFI design studies blending traditional and technological elements.
Rapid spread of harmful misinformation has led to a dire need for effective media literacy interventions, to which educational games have been suggested as a possible solution. Researchers and educators have created several games that increase media literacy and resilience to misinformation. However, the existing body of misinformation education games rarely focus upon the socio-emotional influences that factor into misinformation belief. Misinformation correction and serious games have both explored narrative as a method to engage with people on an emotional basis. To this end, we investigated how 123 young adults (mean age = 22.98) experienced narrative transportation and identification in two narrative-centered misinformation escape room games developed for library settings. We found that propensity for certain misinformation contexts, such as engagement with fan culture and likelihood to share on social media platforms, significantly affected how participants experienced specific measures of narrative immersion within the games. We discuss design implications for tailoring educational interventions to specific misinformation contexts.
Social media has become a primary information source, with platforms evolving from text-based to multi-modal environments that include images and videos. While richer media modalities enhance user engagement, they also increase the spread and perceived credibility of misinformation. Most interventions to counter misinformation on social media are text-based, which may lack the persuasive power of richer modalities. This study explores whether the effectiveness of misinformation correction varies by modality, and if certain modalities of misinformation are better countered by a specific correction modality. We conducted a survey-based experiment where participants rated the credibility of misinformation tweets before and after exposure to corrections, across all combinations of text, images and video modalities. Our findings suggest that corrections are most effective when their modality richness matches that of the original misinformation. We discuss factors affecting the perceived credibility of corrections and offer strategies to optimise misinformation correction.
Displaying community fact-checks is a promising approach to reduce engagement with misinformation on social media. However, how users respond to misleading content emotionally after community fact-checks are displayed on posts is unclear. Here, we employ quasi-experimental methods to causally analyze changes in sentiments and (moral) emotions in replies to misleading posts following the display of community fact-checks. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale panel dataset comprising N=2,225,260 replies across 1841 source posts from X's Community Notes platform. We find that informing users about falsehoods through community fact-checks significantly increases negativity (by 7.3%), anger (by 13.2%), disgust (by 4.7%), and moral outrage (by 16.0%) in the corresponding replies. These results indicate that users perceive spreading misinformation as a violation of social norms and that those who spread misinformation should expect negative reactions once their content is debunked. We derive important implications for the design of community-based fact-checking systems.