Nudging Users to Slow Down the Spread of Fake News in Social Media

The success of fake news spreading on social media is to a large extent because of normal users unknowingly parroting or sharing such content. Educational interventions such as information campaigns or revised curricula aim to raise users’ awareness and critical thinking skills. However, these are long-term efforts with an uncertain outcome. In this paper, we present ShareAware, our prototype for nudging users into a more conscious posting and sharing behavior. ShareAware uses linguistic analyses to infer the factuality of content and credibility of sources before being posted or shared. The results provide users with immediate feedback to discourage the dissemination of questionable content. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach using a series of simulations.