Trustworthiness Of Websites Research Articles

The Contingent Effects of IS Certifications on the Trustworthiness of Websites

Information systems (IS) research has largely treated IS certifications (i.e., graphical cues that prove the endorsement of independent third parties) as universally effective at improving website visitors’ perceptions of trustworthiness. However, inconclusive findings on the effectiveness of IS certifications on websites have emerged, critically challenging their usefulness. We seek to reconcile these inconclusive findings by drawing on swift trust theory and the notion of humans as cognitive misers. Specifically, we investigate whether the effects of IS certifications are contingent on visitors’ expectations and the website’s baseline trustworthiness (i.e., the original website before adding and visitors’ processing of IS certifications). Through a multistudy investigation combining an online (N = 191) and a follow-up field experiment with up to €4 million in sales volume (N = 306), we reveal the contingent effects of IS certifications on the trustworthiness of websites: Below (but not above) a certain level of a website’s baseline trustworthiness (i.e., the trust tipping point), IS certifications significantly increase trustworthiness. We also show that IS certifications do not increase the likelihood of user registrations (i.e., trust-related behavior) when a website’s baseline trustworthiness surpasses this trustworthiness threshold. Overall, we provide an important new perspective that explains and resolves previous inconsistent findings on the (in)effectiveness of IS certifications for trustworthiness and subsequent trust-related behaviors. We equip practitioners with valuable and actionable guidance on the usefulness of IS certifications to strengthen their digital businesses.

The Readability Analysis of Online Education Materials for Kidney Transplantation

Introduction: The growing use of online information influences people's healthcare decision making in terms of treatment or consulting a doctor. The readability of a website is a factor that influences the correct understanding of its content. Regarding that there is little information about the readability as well as the credibility of health websites in the field of kidney transplantation, the present study assesses the readability and trustworthiness of websites in this topic.Material and Methods: Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines were used to search for "Kidney Transplantation" and "Renal Transplantation.". Four readability scales were applied to assess the readability of the first 30 results of each search engine. The HONcode toolbar was applied to recognize credible websites. The relationship between HONcode verification and website position on the search results pages was explored. Furthermore, the difference between the readability scores and website position on the search results pages was tested. The readability difference between search result pages was also examined.Results: According to the results, the assessed websites are suitable for students or high school graduates. Furthermore, the association between the average readability of websites and website position on the search results pages was significant (p-value<0.05). A significant association between HONcode-verified sites and website position on the search results pages was also revealed (p-value=0.011).Conclusion: The readability of kidney transplantation websites is far above the recommended level. Therefore, health organizations must consider readability while designing their websites.

Children as social actors negotiating their privacy in the digital commercial context

This study advances research on children’s negotiation of online commercial privacy by identifying an act of digital agency by children that may serve their current needs but can also impact children negatively. Secondly, it identifies certain factors children consider while evaluating the trustworthiness of apps and websites before disclosing information online. Eight focus group discussions with children (13–16 years) in Finland’s capital region are analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings highlight that while children’s digital literacy education is needed, ensuring that education translates to children’s online practices is also essential. We also recommend increasing corporations’ accountability in ensuring children’s privacy.

Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking.

Newsfeed algorithms frequently amplify misinformation and other low-quality content. How can social media platforms more effectively promote reliable information? Existing approaches are difficult to scale and vulnerable to manipulation. In this paper, we propose using the political diversity of a website's audience as a quality signal. Using news source reliability ratings from domain experts and web browsing data from a diverse sample of 6,890 US residents, we first show that websites with more extreme and less politically diverse audiences have lower journalistic standards. We then incorporate audience diversity into a standard collaborative filtering framework and show that our improved algorithm increases the trustworthiness of websites suggested to users-especially those who most frequently consume misinformation-while keeping recommendations relevant. These findings suggest that partisan audience diversity is a valuable signal of higher journalistic standards that should be incorporated into algorithmic ranking decisions.

From Google Searches to Russian Disinformation: Adolescent Critical Race Digital Literacy Needs and Skills

This study uses a Critical Race Digital Literacy framework to examine Black and Latinx adolescents’ ability to critically evaluate race-related materials online. Participants completed four tasks that required them to engage with a range of race-related material, from search results to social media content. Findings indicate that the majority of participants demonstrated an “emerging” or “mastery” level understanding of search results and determining the trustworthiness of websites. Participants found evaluating the credibility of Twitter content as well as evaluating a Russian disinformation campaign’s Facebook profile targeting African Americans considerably more challenging. In addition, though 34% recognized a video screenshot arguing that building a wall at the southern border is humane as racist, participants had difficulty combining this knowledge with an understanding of online propaganda. Few participants reached mastery on this task, and others that required them to evaluate social media content and recognize disinformation. As more online content and media are explicitly related to race or references specific racial groups, these findings highlight the need for more interventions to enhance competencies around critically evaluating race-related materials online.

Real or Not?

Untrustworthy content such as fake news and clickbait have become a pervasive problem on the Internet, causing significant socio-political problems around the world. Identifying untrustworthy content is a crucial step in countering them. The current best practices for identification involve content analysis and arduous fact-checking of the content. To complement content analysis, we propose examining websites’ third-parties to identify their trustworthiness. Websites utilize third-parties, also known as their digital supply chains, to create and present content and help the website function. Third-parties are an important indication of a website's business model. Similar websites exhibit similarities in the third-parties they use. Using this perspective, we use machine learning and heuristic methods to discern similarities and dissimilarities in third-party usage, which we use to predict trustworthiness of websites. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in predicting trustworthiness of websites from a database of News, Fake News, and Clickbait websites. Our approach can be easily and cost-effectively implemented to reinforce current identification methods.

Trustworthy Website Detection Based on Social Hyperlink Network Analysis

Trustworthy website detection plays an important role in providing users with meaningful web pages, from a search engine. Current solutions to this problem, however, mainly focus on detecting spam websites, instead of promoting more trustworthy ones. In this paper, we propose the enhanced OpinionWalk (EOW) algorithm to compute the trustworthiness of all websites and identify trustworthy websites with higher trust values. The proposed EOW algorithm treats the hyperlink structure of websites as a social network and applies social trust analysis to calculate the trustworthiness of individual websites. To mingle social trust analysis and trustworthy website detection, we model the trustworthiness of a website based on the quantity and quality of websites it points to. We further design a mechanism in EOW to record which websites' trustworthiness need to be updated while the algorithm “walks” through the network. As a result, the execution of EOW is reduced by 27.1 percent, compared to the OpinionWalk algorithm. Using the public dataset, WEBSPAM-UK2006, we validate the EOW algorithm and analyze the impacts of seed selection, size of seed set, maximum searching depth and starting nodes, on the algorithm. Experimental results indicate that EOW algorithm identifies 5.35 to 16.5 percent more trustworthy websites, compared to TrustRank.

Secret groups and open forums: Defining online support communities from the perspective of people affected by cancer.

ObjectiveA quarter of people diagnosed with cancer lack social support. Online cancer communities could allow people to connect and support one another. However, the current proliferation of online support communities constitutes a range of online environments with differing communication capacities and limitations. It is unclear what is perceived as online cancer community support and how different features can help or hinder supportive group processes. This study aimed to explore how perceived support is influenced by the different features and formats of online support environments.MethodsIn-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 23 individuals affected by a range of cancer diagnoses, including both cancer survivors and family members. Data were analysed using deductive thematic analysis guided by a constructivist epistemological perspective.FindingsOnline supportive communities were defined and differentiated by two themes. Firstly, ‘Open forums’ were identified with thematic properties which facilitated a uniquely informative environment including ‘Safety in anonymity’, ‘Perceived reliability’ and ‘Exposure and detachment’. Secondly, ‘Secret groups’ were identified with thematic properties which enhanced an emotionally supportive environment including ‘Personalised interactions’, an overt ‘Peer hierarchy’, and ‘Crossing the virtual divide’.ConclusionsProperties of groups can engender different degrees of interpersonal relations and different supportive interactions. In particular, support community designers may want to adapt key features such as anonymity, trustworthiness of websites, and the personalised nature of conversations to influence the development of supportive environments. In personalised peer-led groups, it may be prudent to provide guidance on how to reassert a positive environment if arguments break out online.

How Influential Are Travel Websites On Travelers’ Travel Planning? An Empirical Research in Turkey

Travel Websites have become the most influential tools, and they have been commonly used in today’s world because access to the internet has become easier and more widespread thanks to Information Technologies. This research intended to examine perceptions of Turkish travellers regarding travel websites in terms of their perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived trustworthiness and behavioural intention to use information obtained through travel websites and their impacts in their travel planning and decision-making processes. Simple random sampling method, which is a probability sampling method, was used in data collection and 212 travellers from Turkey filled in the questionnaire. Respondents were filtered with the help of two filtering questions at the beginning of the questionnaire and only those living in Turkey and having travelled for some purpose in the past were included in the study. The results obtained through relevant statistical analyses revealed that there is a positive relationship among perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived trustworthiness of travel websites and behavioural intention to use information obtained from such websites. The research also revealed that education level is a factor influencing travellers’ travel planning processes.

Websites as a tool for public health education: determining the trustworthiness of health websites on Ebola disease.

ObjectivesHealth service providers use internet as a tool for the spreading of health information and people often go on the web to acquire information about a disease. A wide range of information with varying qualities and by authors with varying degrees of credibility has thus become accessible by the public. Most people believe that the health information available on the internet is reliable. This issue reveals the need for having a critical view of the health information available online that is directly related to people's life. The Ebola epidemic is an emergency situation in the international public health domain and the internet is regarded as an important source for obtaining information on this disease. Given the absence of studies on the trustworthiness of health websites on Ebola, the present study was conducted to assess the trustworthiness of websites which are focused on this disease.Methods:The term "Ebola" was searched in Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Google Chrome browser was used for this purpose with the settings fixed on yielding 10 results per page. The first 30 English language websites in each of the three search engines were evaluated manually by using the HONcode of conduct tool. Moreover, the official HONcode toolbar was used to identify websites that had been officially certified by HON foundation. Results: Almost the half of the retrieved websites were commercial (49%). Complementarity was the least-observed criterion (37%) in all the websites retrieved from all three-search engines. Justifiability, Transparency and Financial Disclosure had been completely observed (100%).Discussion:The present study showed that only three criteria (Justifiability, Transparency and Financial Disclosure) out of the eight HON criteria were observed in the examined websites. Like other health websites, the websites concerned with Ebola are not reliable and should be used with caution.Conclusion:Considering the lack of a specific policy about the publication of health information on the web, it is necessary for healthcare providers to advise their patients to use only credible websites. Furthermore, teaching them the criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of health websites would be helpful.

Defining and seeking to identify critical Internet literacy: a discourse analysis of fifth‐graders' Internet search and evaluation activity

AbstractPedagogic focus is shifting increasingly from teaching students to search the Internet efficiently to encouraging critical Internet literacy, but this paper argues that these more complex and subtle skills are both challenging to teach and difficult to identify. The paper presents an analysis of the discourse of triads of fifth graders undertaking an Internet search task that emphasised decisions relating to the trustworthiness and relevance of websites. The analysis uses two lenses – the Vygotskian concept ofobuchenieand Mercer's notion of ‘inter‐thinking’ – to help identify discourse markers that could support teachers in identifying and teaching critical Internet literacy. More work is needed, but it is argued that if our goal is to develop critical Internet literacy, the concept of obuchenie helps us to understand the socio‐cognitive prerequisites of group learning in Internet searching tasks, while the concept of ‘interthinking’ offers us a distribution mechanism that can be applied in helping students acquire the skills of independent and critical analysis as they carry out those tasks.

How to sort trustworthy health online information? Improvements of the automated detection of HONcode criteria

When searching on the Web, laypersons and professionals have difficulty in determining the quality or trustworthiness of health websites. No simple approach can differentiate among trustworthy and unreliable health websites in the results provided by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. The European project Kconnect proposes to classify the reliability and readability levels of health-related Web sites and pages, tools according to the detection of HONcode criteria, the Health On the Net Foundation (HON) Code of Conduct using automated tools that examine how technical the health information contained in each document is. This article focuses on enhancement of automated detection of HONcode criteria in real-time settings. Applications of the approach include integration into the HONcode certification process, and embedding it as generic filtering tool into user-centered health domain search engines as well as into major general search engines such as a Web browser extension.

Trust Necessitated through Metrics: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Websites

The issue of trust is of exhilarating concern in case of information disseminated through websites. Digitization technologies such as Internet has lowered the cost and increased the access to information of all kinds. This increased exposure to information from humongous number of websites poses a need for some mechanism or tool that can address this issue and provide rankings to the websites on basis of their credibility or the trust value they possess. Previous research has shown a lot of efforts in this area. Both exogenous and endogenous signals have been evaluated to derive the credibility of websites. Trust being more of a sociological virtue of psychometric nature; cannot be quantified easily. Aiming this fact we have tried to measure the trust by evaluating the actual behavioral metrics of the users (of the websites) which gets collected by analytical tools automatically with every hit on a website. This gives a pertinent and bias-free quantification of trust value of a website as tools collect the data being anonymous from the user. In this paper, we have introduced our novel web-based tool which estimates trust (of websites) imposed by web metrics collected through similarweb.com. The tool will re-rank the web-links (URLs) extracted from Google search engine for any keyword according to the trust maintained by the actual users of the websites. We will also evaluate the performance of our tool in terms of validated rankings and benchmarking it with other recently acceptable tools.

Teachers' source evaluation self‐efficacy predicts their use of relevant source features when evaluating the trustworthiness of web sources on special education

AbstractBuilding on prior research and theory concerning source evaluation and the role of self‐efficacy in the context of online learning, this study investigated the relationship between teachers' beliefs about their capability to evaluate the trustworthiness of sources and their reliance on relevant source features when judging the trustworthiness of websites concerning special education. We constructed the Source Evaluation Self‐Efficacy Scale (SESES) and used the scores of 263 teachers on this measure to predict their reliance on source features related to the product and the producer of websites when evaluating their trustworthiness. Results showed that even after variance related to gender, age, domain knowledge and frequency of searching the Internet for special education information had been accounted for, teachers' source evaluation self‐efficacy beliefs uniquely predicted their self‐reported use of information about websites' products and producers when judging their trustworthiness. Thus, this research applies self‐efficacy theory and research to a new area and contributes to the burgeoning literature on source evaluation within both reading and information literacy.

Architecture for Checking Trustworthiness of Websites

Today information retrieval from Internet is becoming a commonplace phenomenon. Since, information is readily available and accessible to everyone. Whenever any user types a query in search engine, they would get answers within few micro seconds. However, the results which they get may or may not be accurate because different websites may give different information about the same entity. So, the biggest question is, which website should the user trust? There are many characteristics using that users can determine trustworthiness in content provided by Web information sources. In the proposed system, the filtering of website trustworthiness is based on five major areas as Authority, Related resources, Popularity, Age and Recommendation. The proposed system defines eighteen factors which are categorized under the mentioned five major areas. The website trustworthiness is calculated based on these eighteen factors of each URL and it is stored thereby increasing the performance in retrieving the trustworthy websites. The objective of the proposed system is to provide more trustworthy websites as top results which would save considerable amount of searching time. General Terms Trustworthy, URLs, Information Retrieval, Links, Factors, Webpage, Algorithm

TheWWWDOTApproach to Improving Students’ Critical Evaluation of Websites

AbstractThis article introduces a framework designed to improve students' awareness of the need to critically evaluate websites as sources of information and to improve their skill at doing so. The framework, called theWWWDOTframework, encourages students to think about at least six dimensions when evaluating a website: (1)Who wrote this and what credentials do they have? (2)Why was it written? (3)When was it written and updated? (4)Does this help meet my needs? (5)Organization of website; (6)To do list for the future. In an experimental study, fourth‐ and fifth‐grade students who were taught this framework became more aware than control group students of the need to evaluate information on the Internet for credibility and were better able to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites on multiple dimensions. This article describes the framework and how it can be taught through a series of four 30‐minute lessons. Suggestions and materials for teaching are provided.

Truth Discovery with Multiple Conflicting Information Providers on the Web

The World Wide Web has become the most important information source for most of us. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for the correctness of information on the Web. Moreover, different websites often provide conflicting information on a subject, such as different specifications for the same product. In this paper, we propose a new problem, called Veracity, i.e., conformity to truth, which studies how to find true facts from a large amount of conflicting information on many subjects that is provided by various websites. We design a general framework for the Veracity problem and invent an algorithm, called TRUTHFlNDER, which utilizes the relationships between websites and their information, i.e., a website is trustworthy if it provides many pieces of true information, and a piece of information is likely to be true if it is provided by many trustworthy websites. An iterative method is used to infer the trustworthiness of websites and the correctness of information from each other. Our experiments show that TRUTHFlNDER successfully finds true facts among conflicting information and identifies trustworthy websites better than the popular search engines.

Health Information Literacy and Competencies of Information Age Students: Results From the Interactive Online Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA)

Background In an era of easy access to information, university students who will soon enter health professions need to develop their information competencies. The Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA) is based on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, and it measures proficiency in obtaining health information, evaluating the quality of health information, and understanding plagiarism.Objective This study aimed to measure the proficiency of college-age health information consumers in finding and evaluating electronic health information; to assess their ability to discriminate between peer-reviewed scholarly resources and opinion pieces or sales pitches; and to examine the extent to which they are aware of their level of health information competency.Methods An interactive 56-item online assessment, the Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA), was used to measure the health information competencies of university students. We invited 400 students to take part in the study, and 308 participated, giving a response rate of 77%. The RRSA included multiple-choice questions and problem-based exercises. Declarative and procedural knowledge were assessed in three domains: finding health information, evaluating health information, and understanding plagiarism. Actual performance was contrasted with self-reported skill level. Upon answering all questions, students received a results page that summarized their numerical results and displayed individually tailored feedback composed by an experienced librarian.Results Even though most students (89%) understood that a one-keyword search is likely to return too many documents, few students were able to narrow a search by using multiple search categories simultaneously or by employing Boolean operators. In addition, nearly half of the respondents had trouble discriminating between primary and secondary sources of information as well as between references to journal articles and other published documents. When presented with questionable websites on nonexistent nutritional supplements, only 50% of respondents were able to correctly identify the website with the most trustworthy features. Less than a quarter of study participants reached the correct conclusion that none of the websites made a good case for taking the nutritional supplements. Up to 45% of students were unsure if they needed to provide references for ideas expressed in paraphrased sentences or sentences whose structure they modified. Most respondents (84%) believed that their research skills were good, very good, or excellent. Students’ self-perceptions of skill tended to increase with increasing level of education. Self-reported skills were weakly correlated with actual skill level, operationalized as the overall RRSA score (Cronbach alpha = .78 for 56 RRSA items).Conclusions While the majority of students think that their research skills are good or excellent, many of them are unable to conduct advanced information searches, judge the trustworthiness of health-related websites and articles, and differentiate between various information sources. Students’ self-reports may not be an accurate predictor of their actual health information competencies.