Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines

Even to a simple and short news headline, readers react in a multitude of ways: cognitively (e.g. inferring the writer's intent), emotionally (e.g. feeling distrust), and behaviorally (e.g. sharing the news with their friends). Such reactions are instantaneous and yet complex, as they rely on factors that go beyond interpreting factual content of news. We propose Misinfo Reaction Frames (MRF), a pragmatic formalism for modeling how readers might react to a news headline. In contrast to categorical schema, our free-text dimensions provide a more nuanced way of understanding intent beyond being benign or malicious. We also introduce a Misinfo Reaction Frames corpus, a crowdsourced dataset of reactions to over 25k news headlines focusing on global crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and cancer. Empirical results confirm that it is indeed possible for neural models to predict the prominent patterns of readers' reactions to previously unseen news headlines. Additionally, our user study shows that displaying machine-generated MRF implications alongside news headlines to readers can increase their trust in real news while decreasing their trust in misinformation. Our work demonstrates the feasibility and importance of pragmatic inferences on news headlines to help enhance AI-guided misinformation detection and mitigation.

Understanding Privacy Attitudes and Concerns Towards Remote Communications During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused people around the world to exercise social distancing, which has led to an abrupt rise in the adoption of remote communications for working, socializing, and learning from home. As remote communications will outlast the pandemic, it is crucial to protect users' security and respect their privacy in this unprecedented setting, and that requires a thorough understanding of their behaviors, attitudes, and concerns toward various aspects of remote communications. To this end, we conducted an online study with 220 worldwide Prolific participants. We found that privacy and security are among the most frequently mentioned factors impacting participants' attitude and comfort level with conferencing tools and meeting locations. Open-ended responses revealed that most participants lacked autonomy when choosing conferencing tools or using microphone/webcam in their remote meetings, which in several cases contradicted their personal privacy and security preferences. Based on our findings, we distill several recommendations on how employers, educators, and tool developers can inform and empower users to make privacy-protective decisions when engaging in remote communications.