Social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, deliver digital news to readers in visually deceptive ways.
The format of article previews all look the same. They don’t care to distinguish if some content came from a parody or fake news organization. To them, it’s just another article to show on the feed that will garner likes and shares.
The two article previews shown below illustrate this dilemma. Glance down at them for a second. Do they look legitimate? Both consist of a large hero image, eye-catching headline and caption used to draw in people’s attention. So what exactly is different about them? The left article is produced by The Onion, a satirical news organization. The other one is from a trusted news outlet, The New York Times.
The visual design of the preview on these platforms makes all articles look legitimate when they very well might not be. People assume they’ll receive a full-length article after clicking through the preview. These platforms are playing off of the way people read traditional newspapers. Twitter Moments is the epitome of this paradigm.
From the research my teammates and I conducted during this five week project on digital news, we found that the majority of social media platforms fail to meet this expectation. People have trouble identifying the difference between a fictitious and factual news report because the design of the preview commands the same level of trust and authority.
Team: Noah Johnson, Jessie Headrick / Duration: 5 Weeks
Contributions: Competitive Analysis, Ideation, Mockups, Prototypes, Video Editing
When Twitter Moments first launched, Twitter described it as the "go-to place for casual news at a glance".
They format their previews in the same way that Facebook does, as if it's attached to a full-length news article. What's shocking is that they don't even deliver a paragraph of content after the preview. They simply show related tweets selected by an algorithm. It's not at all moderated by a real person! There also isn't always a source attached to the piece of news. Twitter Moments essentially compiles its "articles" by crowdsourcing content from users on the platform.
Disappointed by this feature, we thought up a design intervention for how we could restructure the layout and design of the previews to better showcase casual news. Coming up with the designs and final prototype of this intervention was one of my main responsibilities in this group project. The main problem with Twitter Moments, as noted before, is that the design of the preview doesn't communicate that its a destination for casual news. First time users are not prepared to find tweets hiding behind the preview.

