دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی پخش اطلاعات و اخبار نادرست در رسانه های اجتماعی - الزویر 2018

Abstract

This study examines dynamic communication processes of political misinformation on social media focusing on three components: the temporal pattern, content mutation, and sources of misinformation. We traced the lifecycle of 17 popular political rumors that circulated on Twitter over 13 months during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Using text analysis based on time series, we found that while false rumors (misinformation) tend to come back multiple times after the initial publication, true rumors (facts) do not. Rumor resurgence continues, often accompanying textual changes, until the tension around the target dissolves. We observed that rumors resurface by partisan news websites that repackage the old rumor into news and, gain visibility by influential Twitter users who introduce such rumor into the Twittersphere. In this paper, we argue that media scholars should consider the mutability of diffusing information, temporal recurrence of such messages, and the mechanism by which these messages evolve over time.

Discussion

In this study, we traced the lifecycle of 17 popular political rumors that circulated in 2012 on Twitter by sifting through Twitter’s enormous haystack of information. Previous research examining the phenomenon of political rumor and misinformation has largely missed this dynamic diffusion process such as how false information emerges, declines, and recurs on social media. Additionally, prior studies generally assumed that diffusing information remains unchanged in terms of its frame or details during circulation (Im et al., 2015). Thus, little is known about whether or how the message containing misinformation changes during its lifecycle and what roles individual media users play in this process. To fill this void, we investigated the dynamic diffusion process of misinformation focusing on its temporal pattern, content change, and information source. First, we found that most false rumors repeated periodically, whereas true rumors did not. Specifically, our data showed that 11 out of 13 false rumors resurged multiple times after the initial burst, while true rumors showed a single spike of sharing without a comeback at a later time. This pattern may mean that rumor spreaders strategically bring back false rumors in hopes Diffusion of Misinformation 23 of influencing others. In particular, we observed many of these rumors resurge nearing the Election Day and yet they stopped spreading abruptly after the Election Day. These findings suggest that the political misinformation phenomenon could be a reflection of campaign tactics employed by those media professionals and individual activists that Rojecki and Meraz (2016) call “partisan entrepreneurs” –who seek political power through the manipulation of information. Then the question becomes why rumormongers do not resuscitate true rumors, which are equally negative toward the target politician. Wouldn’t true rumors be more effective and less risky to repeat for political gains? We have three possible explanations. First, rumor spreaders intuitively focus on false rumors, because they believe that those false ones need more “promotion” or top-down effort, whereas true rumors do not need their help due to the presence of clear evidence. Second, another promising explanation may be the nature of rumor origin.