Designing Effective AI Explanations for Misinformation Detection: A Comparative Study of Content, Social, and Combined Explanations

In this paper, we study the problem of AI explanation of misinformation, where the goal is to identify explanation designs that help improve users’ misinformation detection abilities and their overall user experiences. Our work is motivated by the limitation of current Explainable AI (XAI) approaches, which predominantly focus on content explanations that elucidate the linguistic features and sentence structures of the misinformation. To address this limitation, we explore various explanations beyond content explanation, such as ``social explanation'' that considers the broader social context surrounding misinformation, as well as a ``combined explanation'' where both the content and social explanations are presented in scenarios that are either aligned or misaligned with each other. To evaluate the comparative effectiveness of these AI explanations, we conduct two online crowdsourcing experiments in COVID-19 (Study 1 on Prolific) and Politics domains (Study 2 on MTurk). Our results show that AI explanations are generally effective in aiding users to detect misinformation, with effectiveness significantly influenced by the alignment between content and social explanations. We also find that the order in which explanation types are presented—specifically, whether a content or social explanation comes first—can influence detection accuracy, with differences found between the COVID-19 and Political domains. This work contributes towards more effective design of AI explanations, fostering a deeper understanding of how different explanation types and their combinations influence misinformation detection.