Right-click Authenticate adoption: The impact of authenticating social media postings on information quality

Getting the daily news from social media has nowadays become a common practice among people. Unreliable sources of information expose people to a dose of hoaxes, rumours, conspiracy theories and misleading news. Mixing both reliable and unreliable information on social media has made the truth to be hardly determined. Academic research indicates an increasing reliance of online users on social media as a main source of news. Researchers found that young users, in particular, are to believe what they read on social media without adequate verification. In previous work, we proposed the concept of ‘Right-click Authenticate’ where we suggested designing an accessible tool to authenticate and verify information online before sharing it. In this paper, we present a review of the problem of sharing misinformation online and extend our work by analysing how ‘Right-click Authenticate’ reduces the challenges of while improving key metrics within the Information Quality fields.