BWL XI: Two papers accepted at CSCW

Diffusion of Community Fact-Checked Misinformation on Twitter
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), forthcoming

Abstract: The spread of misinformation on social media is a pressing societal problem that platforms, policymakers, and researchers continue to grapple with. As a countermeasure, recent works have proposed to employ non-expert fact-checkers in the crowd to fact-check social media content. While experimental studies suggest that crowds might be able to accurately assess the veracity of social media content, an understanding of how crowd fact-checked (mis-)information spreads is missing. In this work, we empirically analyze the spread of misleading vs. not misleading community fact-checked posts on social media. For this purpose, we employ a dataset of community-created fact-checks from Twitter's Birdwatch pilot and map them to resharing cascades on Twitter. Different from earlier studies analyzing the spread of misinformation listed on third-party fact-checking websites (e.g., Snopes), we find that community fact-checked misinformation is less viral. Specifically, misleading posts are estimated to receive 36.62% fewer retweets than not misleading posts. A partial explanation may lie in differences in the fact-checking targets: community fact-checkers tend to fact-check posts from influential user accounts with many followers, while expert fact-checks tend to target posts that are shared by less influential users. We further find that there are significant differences in virality across different sub-types of misinformation (e.g., factual errors, missing context, manipulated media). Moreover, we conduct a user study to assess the perceived reliability of (real-world) community-created fact-checks. Here, we find that users, to a large extent, agree with community-created fact-checks. Altogether, our findings offer insights into how misleading vs. not misleading posts spread and highlight the crucial role of sample selection when studying misinformation on social media.

Preprint available via arXiv

Paper 2: Nicolas Pröllochs, Stefan Feuerriegel (2023)
Mechanisms of True and False Rumor Sharing in Social Media: Collective Intelligence or Herd Behavior?
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), forthcoming.

Abstract: Social media platforms disseminate extensive volumes of online content, including true and, in particular, false rumors. Previous literature has studied the diffusion of offline rumors, yet more research is needed to understand the diffusion of online rumors. In this paper, we examine the role of lifetime and crowd effects in social media sharing behavior for true vs. false rumors. Based on 126,301 Twitter cascades, we find that the sharing behavior is characterized by lifetime and crowd effects that explain differences in the spread of true as opposed to false rumors. All else equal, we find that a longer lifetime is associated with less sharing activities, yet the reduction in sharing is larger for false than for true rumors. Hence, lifetime is an important determinant explaining why false rumors die out. Furthermore, we find that the spread of false rumors is characterized by herding tendencies (rather than collective intelligence), whereby the spread of false rumors becomes proliferated at a larger retweet depth. These findings explain differences in the diffusion dynamics of true and false rumors and further offer practical implications for social media platforms.

Preprint available via arXiv