Rumor Has It: The Adoption of Unverified Information in Conflict Zones

Greenhill, Kelly M.; Oppenheim, Ben

doi:10.1093/isq/sqx015

Cited by 123 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…For instance, Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) found that level of education was not statistically significantly associated with how likely readers were to believe an ideologically aligned story (but people with higher education tended to have more accurate beliefs about news). Furthermore, Greenhill and Oppenheim (2017) found that education, income, age and gender, what they describe as commonly cited factors in receptivity to rumours, did not seem to have a correlation with how likely people were to believe a rumour.…”

Section: Educating the Publicmentioning

confidence: 94%

Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection

Asr

Taboada

2019

Big Data & Society

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Fake news has become an important topic of research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics and computer science. In this paper, we explain how the problem is approached from the perspective of natural language processing, with the goal of building a system to automatically detect misinformation in news. The main challenge in this line of research is collecting quality data, i.e., instances of fake and real news articles on a balanced distribution of topics. We review available datasets and introduce the MisInfoText repository as a contribution of our lab to the community. We make available the full text of the news articles, together with veracity labels previously assigned based on manual assessment of the articles' truth content. We also perform a topic modelling experiment to elaborate on the gaps and sources of imbalance in currently available datasets to guide future efforts. We appeal to the community to collect more data and to make it available for research purposes.

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Section: Educating the Publicmentioning

confidence: 94%

Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection

Asr

Taboada

2019

Big Data & Society

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“…Further, more work must examine how these scales translate across geographic context, particularly into closed societies where the conspiracy theories about government are likely to be more rational. The study of conspiracy theories is beginning to traverse geographic boundaries; for example, see works on Turkey (Nefes, ), Russia (Yablokov, ), Europe (Drochon, ), the Middle East (Nyhan & Zeitzoff, ; Siddiqui, in press), Latin America (Filer, ), and Thailand (Greenhill & Oppenheim, ). Studies should begin integrating these various findings to develop broader theories.…”

Section: Definitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Conspiracy Theories

Douglas

Uscinski

Sutton

et al. 2019

Political Psychology

962

907

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Scholarly efforts to understand conspiracy theories have grown significantly in recent years, and there is now a broad and interdisciplinary literature. In reviewing this body of work, we ask three specific questions. First, what factors are associated with conspiracy beliefs? Our review of the literature shows that conspiracy beliefs result from a range of psychological, political, and social factors. Next, how are conspiracy theories communicated? Here, we explain how conspiracy theories are shared among individuals and spread through traditional and social media platforms. Next, what are the societal risks and rewards associated with conspiracy theories? By focusing on politics and science, we argue that conspiracy theories do more harm than good. We conclude by suggesting several promising avenues for future research.

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“…Particular attention in the current moment has pivoted around how a stream of rumors, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and "faked news" are degrading public trust in institutions in general, and the processes of government and democracy in particular (Gonzalez-Bailon, 2017;Greenhill & Oppenheim, 2017;Kavanagh & Rich, 2018;Oh, Agrawal, & Rao, 2013). However, deploying rumors and conspiracy theories to modify how people think, feel, or behave has not been confined to democratic processes.…”

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confidence: 99%

Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating “soft facts” after terrorism

Innés

2020

British Journal of Sociology

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Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of “techniques of disinformation” used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also advances scholarship on the workings of disinforming communications, by focusing on a domain other than political elections, which has been the empirical focus for most studies of disinformation to date. Theoretically, the analysis is framed by drawing an analogy with Gresham Sykes and David Matza's (1957) account of the role of “techniques of neutralization” originally published in the American Sociological Review. The connection being that where they studied deviant behaviour, a similar analytic lens can usefully be applied to disinformation cast as “deviant” information.

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Rumor Has It: The Adoption of Unverified Information in Conflict Zones

Cited by 123 publications

References 57 publications

Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection

Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection

Understanding Conspiracy Theories

Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating “soft facts” after terrorism

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