To believe or not to believe? Investigating factors that play a role in audiences’ critical thinking process when evaluating the trustworthiness of online news and information

In this paper, we will scrutinize which factors play a role in audience members' critical thinking processes when evaluating the trustworthiness of online news and information. This research is conducted in the context of the Horizon Europe TITAN project, where an AI-based engine will be developed to fight disinformation by encouraging audiences' critical thinking processes. Online audiences have been confronted with a proportional propagation of unreliable information and news, also known as disinformation. The audience requires a certain degree of critical thinking to be able to recognize this false information and ameliorate the ways in which they handle disinformation. We applied a participatory, human-centered methodology to understand both how audiences currently deal with disinformation and their current critical thinking processes. A five-hour co-creation workshop, with a diverse group of 23 participants, was conducted. Our goal is to gain an in-depth understanding of participants' everyday life practices, their tactics to handle the information overload, and their thought processes behind assessing the credibility of news and information. The outcome of this paper will, on the one hand, present an overview of the different factors that play a role in the evaluation of online news and information, with an emphasis on audiences' critical thinking processes, as well as the interplay between these factors. On the other hand, it will provide an assessment, with its advantages and disadvantages, of the implemented participative and human-centered methodology as an innovative approach towards audience research.