Reliability Criteria for News Websites

Abstract

Misinformation poses a threat to democracy and to people's health. Reliability criteria for news websites can help people identify misinformation. But despite their importance, there has been no empirically substantiated list of criteria for distinguishing reliable from unreliable news websites. We identify reliability criteria, describe how they are applied in practice, and compare them to prior work. Based on our analysis, we distinguish between manipulable and less manipulable criteria and compare politically diverse laypeople as end users and journalists as expert users. We discuss 11 widely recognized criteria, including the following 6 criteria that are difficult to manipulate: content, political alignment, authors, professional standards, what sources are used, and a website's reputation. Finally, we describe how technology may be able to support people in applying these criteria in practice to assess the reliability of websites.

arXiv commentPublished by ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, presented at CHI 2024

References in corpus (4)

• The science of fake news
• Exploring Lightweight Interventions at Posting Time to Reduce the Sharing of Misinformation on Social Media
• Investigating Differences in Crowdsourced News Credibility Assessment: Raters, Tasks, and Expert Criteria
• A Comparative Evaluation of Interventions Against Misinformation: Augmenting the WHO Checklist

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A Survey on Automatic Credibility Assessment Using Textual Credibility Signals in the Era of Large Language Models
• Social Media for Activists: Reimagining Safety, Content Presentation, and Workflows
• Evaluation of Reliability Criteria for News Publishers with Large Language Models
• The Phase Model of Misinformation Interventions