Abstract
Social media networks (SMN) such as Facebook and Twitter are infamous for facilitating the spread of potentially false rumors. Although it has been argued that SMN enable their users to identify and challenge false rumors through collective efforts to make sense of unverified information—a process typically referred to as self-correction—evidence suggests that users frequently fail to distinguish among rumors before they have been resolved. How users evaluate the veracity of a rumor can depend on the appraisals of others who participate in a conversation. Affordances such as the searchability of SMN, which enables users to learn about a rumor through dedicated search and query features rather than relying on interactions with their relational connections, might therefore affect the veracity judgments at which they arrive. This paper uses agent-based simulations to illustrate that searchability can hinder actors seeking to evaluate the trustworthiness of a rumor’s source and hence impede self-correction. The findings indicate that exchanges between related users can increase the likelihood that trustworthy agents transmit rumor messages, which can promote the propagation of useful information and corrective posts.
Highlights
How rumors—that is, “item[s] of circulating information whose veracity status is yet to be verified at the time of posting” (Zubiaga et al 2018, p 2)—diffuse and persist among the users of social media networks1 (SMN) such as Facebook and Twitter is a timely subject of research
The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical explanation of how the searchability affordance of SMN—that is, users relying on dedicated content access features, rather than their relational ties to other users, to learn about and make sense of a rumor—might divert the flow of social influence and impede self-correction
If users learn about a rumor circulating in SMN through dedicated platform features for accessing digital content, rather than through interacting with others with whom they share a relational connection, it can divert the flow of social influence among them and affect how they evaluate rumor veracity
Summary
How rumors—that is, “item[s] of circulating information whose veracity status is yet to be verified at the time of posting” (Zubiaga et al 2018, p 2)—diffuse and persist among the users of social media networks (SMN) such as Facebook and Twitter is a timely subject of research. By definition, neither necessarily false nor harmful, they are often referred to in the same breath as fake news, hoaxes, and other forms of misinformation, and their impact on people’s decisions is seen as potentially critical (Zannettou et al 2019). Despite their bad reputation, rumors may help people manage and make sense of situations they perceive as individually or collectively threatening (DiFonzo and Bordia 2007a). Online rumors and firestorms that are not addressed adequately can have severe negative consequences for companies, including the loss of trust between management, staff, and shareholders, and sustained personal and corporate reputational damage (e.g., Kimmel and Audrain-Pontevia 2010; Pfeffer et al 2014)
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