10 Factors That Shape a Rumor's Capacity for Online Virality
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Kate Starbird
@katestarbird
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With colleagues at @uwcip & @stanfordio, drawing from decades of literature on rumoring and our "rapid response" research to address election misinformation, weve developed a threat framework for anticipating the spread of election-related rumors:
eipartnership.net
10 Factors That Shape a Rumors Capacity for Online Virality Election Integrity Partnership
Election Integrity Partnership researchers share a threat framework adapted for election officials, analysts, and crisis communication teams.
12:00 PM · Sep 21, 2022
https://www.eipartnership.net/blog/rumors-capacity-online-virality-factors
With 2022 U.S. midterm elections just 7 weeks away, our team at the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a nonpartisan coalition of researchers co-led by Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washingtons Center for an Informed Public, wanted to share what we have learned and what decades of research explains about how and why rumors spread. Scholars define rumors as unverified, unofficial pieces of information or stories that circulate from person to person (Allport and Postman, 1947; Kapferer, 1990). Though some rumors turn out to be true, many do not. In the elections context, false rumors can be harmful, e.g., by confusing people about when and where to vote or sowing doubt in election results.
Here, we present an emerging threat framework for assessing the potential virality of election-related rumors, based on existing literature and our own work, including a decade of research into online rumoring (e.g., Spiro et al., 2012; Starbird et al., 2014; Starbird et al., 2016) as well as our real-time efforts to track misinformation during the 2020 and 2022 U.S. elections. We highlight 10 specific factors, stemming from the informational conditions and events that spawn rumors; the social and emotional drivers of rumors; and the unique structures and incentives of social network information systems.
From these factors, the EIP has developed two versions of the threat framework that are adapted to (1) the perspective of election officials trying to anticipate threats related to specific parts of their election process (e.g., materials, procedures) or (2) the work of misinformation analysts trying to gauge the viral potential of an emerging narrative that risks undermining the publics trust in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. This blog post describes these factors and the resulting threat framework in greater depth and provides additional context and important questions to ask when assessing a rumors potential virality.
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