Trust and Transparency: An Exploratory Study on Emerging Adults' Interpretations of Credibility Indicators on Social Media Platforms

The misinformation crisis across social media has disrupted critical access to information in health, politics, and public safety. Content labels have become a feature that social media platforms use to signal credibility of social media posts. Young adults receive a proportionally high percentage of their news through social media platforms, yet prior work has shown that credibility indicators are not effective signals for young audiences. This late-breaking work presents initial findings from an exploratory study into how emerging adults (ages 18-25) assess different credibility indicators currently used on social media platforms. Our findings indicate that participants have a wide variety of interpretations of the purpose and source of context labels, are supportive of automated approaches to content labeling, and trust social media platforms to oversee the application of content labels. This paper contributes these findings to the growing scholarship on content labeling and discusses their implications for designers and policymakers.