People’s online information processing is strongly shaped by social influence, and large language models (LLMs) now enable social bots to manipulate such influence at scale. This paper examines the effects of LLM-driven adversarial social influence—a strategy in which automated agents employ LLMs to distort truth by making misinformation appear credible or by undermining factual news—on how people evaluate and share information. Across two pre-registered, randomized experiments, we first show that exposure to LLM-driven adversarial social influence significantly reduces people’s ability to judge the veracity of news and lowers their discernment between sharing true versus false content. We then test two credibility prompts: AI-generated content detectors and warnings, as potential interventions. Results show that both prompts mitigate some harms such as by improving misinformation detection, though their effectiveness were dependent on the context. We conclude by discussing the risks of LLM-driven adversarial social bots and the implications for designing interventions to combat misinformation.

Social platforms have expanded opportunities for deliberation with the comments being used to inform one’s opinion. However, using such information to form opinions is challenged by unsubstantiated or false content. To enhance the quality of opinion formation and potentially confer resistance to misinformation, we developed Iffy-Or-Not ( ION ), a browser extension that seeks to invoke critical thinking when reading texts. With three features guided by argumentation theory, ION highlights fallacious content, suggests diverse queries to probe them with, and offers deeper questions to consider and chat with others about. From a user study ( \(N=18\) ), we found that ION encourages users to be more attentive to the content, suggests queries that align with or are preferable to their own, and poses thought-provoking questions that expands their perspectives. However, some participants expressed aversion to ION due to misalignments with their information goals and thinking predispositions. Potential backfiring effects with ION are discussed.

Collaborative Qualitative Analysis (CQA) can enhance qualitative analysis rigor and depth by incorporating varied viewpoints. Nevertheless, ensuring a rigorous CQA procedure itself can be both complex and costly. To lower this bar, we take a theoretical perspective to design a one-stop, end-to-end workflow, CollabCoder, that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) into key inductive CQA stages. In the independent open coding phase, CollabCoder offers AI-generated code suggestions and records decision-making data. During the iterative discussion phase, it promotes mutual understanding by sharing this data within the coding team and using quantitative metrics to identify coding (dis)agreements, aiding in consensus-building. In the codebook development phase, CollabCoder provides primary code group suggestions, lightening the workload of developing a codebook from scratch. A 16-user evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of CollabCoder, demonstrating its advantages over the existing CQA platform. All related materials of CollabCoder, including code and further extensions, will be included in: https://gaojie058.github.io/CollabCoder/.

The deliberative potential of online platforms has been widely examined. However, little is known about how various interface-based reflection nudges impact the quality of deliberation. This paper presents two user studies with 12 and 120 participants, respectively, to investigate the impacts of different reflective nudges on the quality of deliberation. In the first study, we examined five distinct reflective nudges: persona, temporal prompts, analogies and metaphors, cultural prompts and storytelling. Persona, temporal prompts, and storytelling emerged as the preferred nudges for implementation on online deliberation platforms. In the second study, we assess the impacts of these preferred reflectors more thoroughly. Results revealed a significant positive impact of these reflectors on deliberative quality. Specifically, persona promotes a deliberative environment for balanced and opinionated viewpoints while temporal prompts promote more individualised viewpoints. Our findings suggest that the choice of reflectors can significantly influence the dynamics and shape the nature of online discussions.

Statistical statements that refer to data to support narratives or claims are commonly used to inform readers about the magnitude of social issues. While contextualizing statistical statements with relevant data supports readers in building their own interpretation of statements, the complexity of finding contextual information on the web and linking statistical statements with it impedes readers’ efforts to do so. We present DataDive, an interactive tool for contextualizing statistical statements for the readers of online texts. Based on users’ selections of statistical statements, our tool uses an LLM-powered pipeline to generate candidates of relevant contexts and poses them as guiding questions to the user as potential contexts for exploration. When the user selects a question, DataDive employs visualizations to further help the user compare and explore contextually relevant data. A technical evaluation shows that DataDive generates important and diverse questions that facilitate exploration around statistical statements and retrieves relevant data for comparison. Moreover, a user study with 21 participants suggests that DataDive facilitates users to explore diverse contexts and to be more aware of how statistical data could relate to the text.

With fact-checking by professionals being difficult to scale on social media, algorithmic techniques have been considered. However, it is uncertain how the public may react to labels by automated fact-checkers. In this study, we investigate the use of automated warning labels derived from misinformation detection literature and investigate their effects on three forms of post engagement. Focusing on political posts, we also consider how partisanship affects engagement. In a two-phases within-subjects experiment with 200 participants, we found that the generic warnings suppressed intents to comment on and share posts, but not on the intent to like them. Furthermore, when different reasons for the labels were provided, their effects on post engagement were inconsistent, suggesting that the reasons could have undesirably motivated engagement instead. Partisanship effects were observed across the labels with higher engagement for politically congruent posts. We discuss the implications on the design and use of automated warning labels.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in digital products for a wide variety of purposes like content creation, recommendation and decision making. With AI technologies designed with the intent of assisting humans becoming more common, understanding how users perceive and interact with the AI becomes an important line of investigation. A key component is trust. Trust is concerned with the confidence users have in the AI and their propensity to use it. While there are many experimental studies evaluating trust in novel AI systems, a review of such studies has called out the inadequacy of the methods used to precisely and sufficiently evaluate trust. Addressing this, we propose an approach that uses the externalization of vulnerability and verbalization of thoughts in experimental studies to more adequately capture actions owing to trust in the AI.