Rumor & rumor correction : expressing uncertainties in the retransmission of false rumors

• Main Author: Mohamad Zulkifli Yahya
• Other Authors: Goh Hoe Lian, Dion
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Library and information science; DRNTU::Science; DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/74381
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Gossips, rumors and casual conversations are a part of the informal, routine exchange of information that humans engage in. During events of crisis, rumors feature prominently due to the extreme uncertainty and lack of information surrounding these situations. Despite recent research that explores rumoring on social media platforms, limited work has focused explicitly on how crowds self-correct rumors through the expression of feelings of anxiety, confusion and skepticism. This dissertation examines how users of social media express uncertainty and subsequently correct online rumors during a period of collective uncertainty. Focusing on tweets from Twitter that were collected and analyzed during an incident surrounding the death hoax of Singapore’s first Prime Minister, different ways of expressing doubts and information-correcting behaviors were identified. Over 8,100 tweets over a 4-day period in 2015 were harvested from Twitter. They were then coded into two dimensions. The first dimension is to identify crowd corrections and to determine whether the rumor is supported or refuted. This is achieved by coding the tweets along 5 mutually exclusive categories. Subsequently, the contents of the tweets were then coded according to the second dimension categories, which captures expressed uncertainty in the rumor corpus following three Shielding behavior sub-categories and five Milling sub-categories. The approach extends the understanding of how expressed uncertainties in online rumoring by users of social media helped in shaping the collective sensemaking process. The results have implications for government agencies, businesses and companies during crisis management. As the findings suggest, expressed uncertainty may be an earlier indicator of rumors than denials or corrections, which could benefit organizations, especially government agencies, in improving the speed of detection of online rumoring, identify them at the initial stage and prevent the spread of false rumors in the online space. If left uncorrected, the misinformation could have a detrimental effect on the stability of the country’s interests and tarnish its reputation. This dissertation also adds to the growing knowledge of rumor studies, rumor correction and the expression of uncertainties by users of social media during crisis events.