Mitigating Conspiracy Thinking with Non-Expert Crowds

As people have become increasingly dependent on the internet for their information needs, they remain vulnerable to interpretations of that information that fit their preexisting attitudes. Adversarial actors have exploited this vulnerability by peddling narratives rationalized with conspiracy thinking, or the logical dysjunctions made while theorizing a conspiracy, creating ambiguous information, or creating misinformation. We are building a system —called ConTrails— to combat conspiracy thinking by both detecting it and by performing interventions on potentially vulnerable information seekers. In order to do this, our system uses the intelligence of a non-expert crowd coordinated with novel crowdsourcing workflows. Preliminary evidence suggests the potential for our system to improve the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI ’19, June 03–05, 2018, Glasgow, UK © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9999-9/18/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 Mitigating Conspiracy Thinking with Non-Expert Crowds CHI ’19, June 03–05, 2018, Glasgow, UK reasoning capabilities of information seekers by aiding them to avoid problematic interpretations of information, thereby improving critical thinking and the engagement of readers. Table 1: Example of Conspiracy Thinking