Network Structure Moderates Intergroup Differentiation of Stereotyped Rumors

DiFonzo, Nicholas; Suls, Jerry; Beckstead, Jason W.; Bourgeois, Martin J.; Homan, Christopher M.; Brougher, Samuel J.; Younge, Andrew J; Terpstra-Schwab, Nicholas

doi:10.1521/soco.2014.32.5.409

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…The current political landscape of social media has particularly negative implications for the spread of misinformation. Experiments have shown that high segregation and clustering within a community increase the polarization of opinions in rumors as well as belief perseverance (DiFonzo et al, 2013(DiFonzo et al, , 2014. Therefore, it is critical to understand how political rumors diffuse and are debunked in a contemporary media environment where users can easily filter and choose their information sources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political rumoring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumor diffusion and correction

Shin

Jian

Driscoll

et al. 2016

New Media & Society

148

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Social media can be a double-edged sword for political misinformation, either a conduit propagating false rumors through a large population or an effective tool to challenge misinformation. To understand this phenomenon, we tracked a comprehensive collection of political rumors on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election campaign, analyzing a large set of rumor tweets (n = 330,538). We found that Twitter helped rumor spreaders circulate false information within homophilous follower networks, but seldom functioned as a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. Rumor spreaders formed strong partisan structures in which core groups of users selectively transmitted negative rumors about opposing candidates. Yet, rumor rejecters neither formed a sizable community nor exhibited a partisan structure. While in general rumors resisted debunking by professional fact-checking sites (e.g. Snopes), this was less true of rumors originating with satirical sources.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political rumoring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumor diffusion and correction

Shin

Jian

Driscoll

et al. 2016

New Media & Society

148

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Psychometric analysis. To understand the if there are behavioral changes in terms of content generated and shared by users with increasing activity, we use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary, 9 which identi es emotions in words [18]. We measure the fraction of tweets containing the LIWC categories: anger, sadness, posemo, negemo, and anxiety.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…DiFonzo et al [9] report on a user study that shows how the network structure a ects the formation of stereotypes when discussing controversial topics. They nd that segregation and clustering lead to a stronger "echo chamber" e ect, with higher polarization of opinions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media

Garimella

Morales

Gionis

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference

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We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Speci cally, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as evidenced by the number of users discussing a topic. Spikes in the volume of users typically correspond to external events that increase the public attention on the topic -as, for instance, discussions about 'gun control' often erupt after a mass shooting.This work is the rst to study the dynamic evolution of polarized online debates at such scale. By employing a wide array of network and content analysis measures, we nd consistent evidence that increased collective attention is associated with increased network polarization and network concentration within each side of the debate; and overall more uniform lexicon usage across all users.

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“…The particular configurations of individuals within a social network space, which can assume ribbon, torus or family forms (Latané & L'Herrou, 1996), might have a direct impact on communication processes and rumour transmission in particular (DiFonzo & Bordia, 2007c). Recent studies on the basis of computer‐mediated social network experiments have demonstrated that changes to the configuration of a social network and specifically to the network arrangement of individuals within a social space had a direct influence on belief in a rumour as well as the transmission and persistence of the rumour (DiFonzo et al, 2013; DiFonzo et al, 2014).…”

Section: Towards a Socially Situated Approach To Rumour Transmissionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a socially situated rumouring: Historical and critical perspectives of rumour transmission

Pelletier

Drozda‐Senkowska

2020

Social & Personality Psych

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Rumours are an ubiquitous feature of people's social life and one of the oldest topics in social psychology. Rumours, which tend to spread during crisis situations, allow people to mitigate unpleasant feelings and construct a meaning of the surrounding world. Rumour transmission has been associated with a number of specific individual (e.g., anxiety, personal involvement) and situational (e.g., ambiguity, uncertainty) characteristics and studied with the serial reproduction paradigm (Allport & Postman, 1947) in laboratory settings. The main criticism of rumour research has been its focus on primarily individual-level analyses in an attempt to explain a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the classic serial reproduction paradigm tends to omit the essential properties of interpersonal interactions and communication processes. Despite the recent and rapidly growing trend of social network methods in social and behavioural sciences, rumour research could also include a finer analysis of individuals' social characteristics and the related complexity of real-life communication processes.Therefore, the integration of a socially situated approach to rumour transmission might be especially relevant for rumour research and promising for the study of other social phenomena by extension.Rumours are a pervasive feature of people's social life. All people have been confronted by idle conversation in their surroundings that was later revealed to be largely or even completely false. Such inexact or false hearsay can relate to daily concerns or major societal issues. Rumours about the supposed perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City spread throughout the world within a few hours of the

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Network Structure Moderates Intergroup Differentiation of Stereotyped Rumors

Cited by 19 publications

References 75 publications

Political rumoring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumor diffusion and correction

Political rumoring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumor diffusion and correction

The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media

Towards a socially situated rumouring: Historical and critical perspectives of rumour transmission

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