It's About Time: Attending to Temporality in Misinformation Interventions

Abstract

Recent studies in HCI have explored how we might reduce the spread of online misinformation by helping people learn how to evaluate information in more skillful ways. Unfortunately, it isn't clear that such interventions have been meaningfully integrated into communities. To better understand why this is the case, this paper engages over thirty information professionals (educators, librarians, and journalists) who promote digital literacy in BIPOC and rural communities. Our participants describe a temporal mismatch, whereby digital literacy requires time-consuming processes that cannot be accelerated, but institutional and societal pressures demand speed. We also describe strategies that participants envisaged to cope with this mismatch. This leads us to discuss how the HCI community can better engage with the temporal aspects of digital literacy work, with a view toward expanding the range of solutions we can design to address the misinformation crisis.