To trust or not to trust? An investigation into users’ action and perception towards crowdsourced information

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a job or task completed by a large number of people in the form of an open call. Anyone may contribute information to the crowdsourcing platforms due to its open participation characteristic. With the rising number of crowdsourcing applications, the number of the participating crowd has increased. The identities of the crowd can be anonymous or dummy. Thus, the risk of having malicious crowd providing unreliable information is there. It is therefore important to have a mechanism that can automatically distinguish between reliable and unreliable information contributed by the crowd to increase the reliability of the crowdsourcing applications. The first step towards the construction of such mechanism is to understand how people verify the online information received. Therefore, a survey was performed with the aim to obtain information on the users (crowd) perception towards the information received online from the other crowd and how they react to it. A total of 64 responses was received, comprising a mixture of those who immediately trust, immediately ignore and perform verification first to the online information received. For those who indicated that they verify the information first, means to verify the information were asked. An analysis was performed on the various ways used by the crowd in verifying the accuracy of the online information received. From the analysis, six means to verify the online information were identified. The six means can serve as the basis in the construction of the mechanism to automatically verify the online information received from the crowd, which is useful for improving the reliability of crowdsourcing applications. In this paper, the factors that influence the crowd to trust or ignore the online information received are also presented. © 2020, World Academy of Research in Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.