“Just My Intuition”: Awareness of Versus Acting on Political News Misinformation

Abstract

Citizens are becoming increasingly aware of the prevalence of misinformation, disinformation, and rumors, especially on political topics. But currently, the literature lacks clarity on how citizens are dealing with this issue. And information science and HCI researchers propose design solutions such as diverse information platforms assuming that citizens - with more information at hand - will be able to rationalize political misinformation on their own. In this paper, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 Hong Kong residents. Our findings point out that while most of our participants were aware of misinformation, they mostly did not act on them. This suggests that while it is important for designers to further develop information rich news representations, researchers also need to develop alternative solutions such as news literacy education as long term remedies.