CoNewsReader: Supporting Comprehensive Understanding and Raising Critical Thoughts on Social Media News Through Comments
For general social media users, this work addresses the challenge of critical news reading by introducing a novel comment-based tool, though the study is limited to university students.
CoNewsReader, a comment-based tool powered by a large language model, helps users comprehend news and raise critical thoughts by leveraging social media comments. In a within-subjects study with 24 university students, it led to more engaging critical news reading and better comprehension and critical thinking compared to a baseline interface.
Critical news reading (CNR), which requires grasping the holistic ideas of and raising critical thoughts on the news, is beneficial yet challenging for general people who usually get information on daily social media. Comments under the news can aid CNR by providing complementary information and other readers' diverse and critical thoughts. However, it is under-investigated how to leverage these comments to support users in CNR. In this paper, we first derive user requirements for a comment-based CNR tool from literature and a formative study (N=12). Then, we develop CoNewsReader, a comment-based interactive CNR tool powered by a large language model. CoNewsReader supports users in grasping the news idea with complementary information from comments, filtering useful comments for CNR, and getting questions generated based on the comments to conduct critical thinking. Our within-subjects study with 24 university students indicates that compared to a baseline news reading interface in social media, participants with CoNewsReader have a more engaging CNR experience and perform better on comprehending the news and raising critical thoughts. We discuss design considerations for supporting reading tasks with user- and machine-generated content.