AN EVIDENCE-BASED DIGITAL NUDGING IN SUPPORT OF HEALTH MISINFORMATION ASSESSMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA SITES

In recent years, social media have dramatically improved the dissemination speed of information, which also includes health misinformation. To date, most of the computational approaches to addressing this problem have focused on detecting and flagging misinformation content. However, the majority of these approaches have overlooked many important aspects of health misinformation, such as the behavior of evidence sources and the sharing decisions of social media users. To address the limitations, this dissertation research develops an evidence-based approach to detecting health misinformation and to intervening user sharing intention on social media sites. This work takes on a new perspective regarding health misinformation by understanding user stance (i.e., for, against, neutral) due to their motivation of influencing others. Moreover, this research investigates arguments that combine both stance and evidence for assessing the credibility of health information for the very first time. Our analysis of evidence distribution in health information tweets shows that 70% of tweets contain source-based evidence, which provides the foundation for proposing an evidence-based approach to misinformation detection. Based on these results, we built argument detection models to identify stance positions within arguments. Our results demonstrate the importance of evidence-based features in identifying the stance within arguments on social media sites. Drawing on the evidentiality theory, information credibility heuristics, and consistency heuristics, we propose a research model that seeks to explain health misinformation detection and sharing behavior with evidence-based interventions. To test the research model, we designed and developed eleven types of evidence-based digital nudges and used them to conduct user experiments. The empirical results demonstrate that our nudge design improves credibility assessment of health misinformation. This dissertation makes several research contributions. First, it extends an evidentiality theory and credibility cognitive heuristics provided by health experts to analyze the types of evidence included in health-related user-generated content Second, it presents an evidence-based schema for categorizing evidence in user-generated content. Third, it uses evidentiality theory as the kernel theory to guide the design of digital nudges. In particular, it illustrates how evidence-based design artifacts can be used to support augmented intelligence for mitigating the spread of health-related misinformation on social media sites. Finally, it combines cognitive heuristics to the design of digital nudges. Specifically, it uses information credibility and consistency heuristics to analyze user-generated content on social media sites. The outcomes of this research have significant implications for augmenting users’ assessment of health information credibility and enabling timely intervention of misinformation on social media sites.