TRUTH DECAYCan Wikipedia-like Citations on YouTube Curb Misinformation?
Videos can be dense with information: text, audio, and image after image. Yet each of these layers presents a potential source of error or deceit. And when people search for videos directly on a site like YouTube, sussing out which videos are credible sources can be tricky.
While Google has long been synonymous with search, people are increasingly seeking information directly through video platforms such as YouTube. Videos can be dense with information: text, audio, and image after image. Yet each of these layers presents a potential source of error or deceit. And when people search for videos directly on a site like YouTube, sussing out which videos are credible sources can be tricky.
To help people vet videos, University of Washington researchers created and tested Viblio, a browser extension that lets viewers and creators add Wikipedia-like citations to YouTube videos. The prototype offers users an alternate timeline, studded with notes and links to sources that support, refute or expand on the information presented in the video. Those links also appear in a list view, like the “References” section at the end of Wikipedia articles. In tests, 12 participants found the tool useful for gauging the credibility of videos on topics ranging from biology to political news to COVID-19 vaccines.
The team will present its findings May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Viblio is not available to the public.
“We wanted to come up with a method to encourage people watching videos to do what’s called ‘lateral reading,’ which is that you go look at other places on the web to establish whether something is credible or true, as opposed to diving deep into the thing itself,” said senior author Amy X. Zhang, an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “In previous research, I’d worked with the people at X’s Community Notes and with Wikipedia and seen that crowdsourcing citations and judgments can be a useful way to call out misinformation on platforms.”
To inform Viblio’s design, the team studied how 12 participants — mostly college students under 30 — gauged the credibility of YouTube videos when searching for them on the platform and while watching them. All said familiarity with the video’s source and the name of the channel were important. But many cited signs of a video’s potentially faulty credibility: the quality of the video, the user’s degree of interest in it, its ranking in search results, its length and the number of views or subscribers.
