Factors affecting rumor spreading of social network sites

Abstract

The emergence of social network sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube etc.) has been playing an important role for modern people’s lives. The social network sites provide users online maintaining and expanding interpersonal space and opportunities. Many social network sites have been a platform to share the news and information with friends and family. The social network sites facilitate the information flow through user’s friend circle, so various information spreads quickly and so does rumor. This study adopts the theoretical perspective of an Elaboration Likelihood Model to identify the informative and normative factors that influence the credibility judgment of online rumors in social network sites context. Based on the 335 valid samples from the online questionnaire, statistical testing of research models using partial least squares. The results of this study are similar to the ELM claim that argument quality and source credibility have significant effects on rumor credibility. This indicates that rumor spreading of SNSs is based not only on the argument quality, but also on the source credibility. Moreover, compared with argument quality, the source credibility has a stronger impact on rumor credibility. This means that the degree to which the user needs source credibility plays a major key role to decide the rumor credibility. The study also suggests the possible importance of argument quality and source credibility of rumor. Specifically, we identified three components of argument quality and four components of source credibility.