scholarly journals Social media affordances and information abundance: Enabling fake news sharing during the COVID-19 health crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 146045822110214
Author(s):  
Oberiri Destiny Apuke ◽  
Bahiyah Omar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Load Theory ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Status Seeking ◽  
News Sharing

This study modelled factors that predict fake news sharing during the COVID-19 health crisis using the perspective of the affordance and cognitive load theory. Data were drawn from 385 social media users in Nigeria, and Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to analyse the data. We found that news-find-me perception, information overload, trust in online information, status seeking, self-expression and information sharing predicted fake news sharing related to COVID-19 pandemic among social media users in Nigeria. Greater effects of news-find-me perception and information overload were found on fake news sharing behaviour as compared to trust in online information, status seeking, self-expression and information sharing. Theoretically, our study enriches the current literature by focusing on the affordances of social media and the abundance of online information in predicting fake news sharing behaviour among social media users, especially in Nigeria. Practically, we suggest intervention strategies which nudge people to be sceptical of the information they come across on social media.

Fake or real news? Understanding the gratifications and personality traits of individuals sharing fake news on social media platforms

2022 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brinda Sampat ◽  
Sahil Raj
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
News Sharing

Purpose“Fake news” or misinformation sharing using social media sites into public discourse or politics has increased dramatically, over the last few years, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic causing concern. However, this phenomenon is inadequately researched. This study examines fake news sharing with the lens of stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, uses and gratification theory (UGT) and big five personality traits (BFPT) theory to understand the motivations for sharing fake news and the personality traits that do so. The stimuli in the model comprise gratifications (pass time, entertainment, socialization, information sharing and information seeking) and personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness and neuroticism). The feeling of authenticating or instantly sharing news is the organism leading to sharing fake news, which forms the response in the study.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual model was tested by the data collected from a sample of 221 social media users in India. The data were analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling to determine the effects of UGT and personality traits on fake news sharing. The moderating role of the platform WhatsApp or Facebook was studied.Findings The results suggest that pass time, information sharing and socialization gratifications lead to instant sharing news on social media platforms. Individuals who exhibit extraversion, neuroticism and openness share news on social media platforms instantly. In contrast, agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits lead to authentication news before sharing on the social media platform.Originality/value This study contributes to social media literature by identifying the user gratifications and personality traits that lead to sharing fake news on social media platforms. Furthermore, the study also sheds light on the moderating influence of the choice of the social media platform for fake news sharing.

Adversarial Cross-domain Community Question Retrieval

2022 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Aibo Guo ◽  
Xinyi Li ◽  
Ning Pang ◽  
Xiang Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Feature Space ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Adversarial Training ◽  
Sentence Matching ◽  
Target Data

Community Q&A forum is a special type of social media that provides a platform to raise questions and to answer them (both by forum participants), to facilitate online information sharing. Currently, community Q&A forums in professional domains have attracted a large number of users by offering professional knowledge. To support information access and save users’ efforts of raising new questions, they usually come with a question retrieval function, which retrieves similar existing questions (and their answers) to a user’s query. However, it can be difficult for community Q&A forums to cover all domains, especially those emerging lately with little labeled data but great discrepancy from existing domains. We refer to this scenario as cross-domain question retrieval. To handle the unique challenges of cross-domain question retrieval, we design a model based on adversarial training, namely, X-QR , which consists of two modules—a domain discriminator and a sentence matcher. The domain discriminator aims at aligning the source and target data distributions and unifying the feature space by domain-adversarial training. With the assistance of the domain discriminator, the sentence matcher is able to learn domain-consistent knowledge for the final matching prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to investigate the domain adaption problem of sentence matching for community Q&A forums question retrieval. The experiment results suggest that the proposed X-QR model offers better performance than conventional sentence matching methods in accomplishing cross-domain community Q&A tasks.

scholarly journals Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 4255-4274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chadwick ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Ben O’Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
News Article ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Status ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
News Sharing

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing ( N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data ( N = 17,989 web domains), news article data ( N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users ( N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.

scholarly journals Consumer perceptions of using social media for health purposes: Benefits and drawbacks

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 1661-1674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arcelio Benetoli ◽  
Timothy F Chen ◽  
Parisa Aslani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Knowledge ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Consumers are increasingly using social media to interact with other consumers about health conditions and treatment options. This study aimed to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using social media for health-related purposes from the consumers’ perspectives. Five focus groups with 36 Australian adults with a chronic condition and on medication were conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed. Consumers reported that social media was very convenient, for accessing health-related information and for peer engagement; user-friendly; improved their health knowledge; empowered them; and provided social and emotional support. The disadvantages included information overload, wasting time; negative feelings; doubts about online information credibility; and issues related to online interactions. Despite some disadvantages, health-related use of social media led consumers to feel supported, knowledgeable, and empowered. Consumers’ motivation to keep accessing social media for health-related purposes opens up avenues for the delivery of services via social media.

scholarly journals Impact of Online Information on Self-Isolation Intention During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Study

10.2196/19128 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. e19128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Farooq ◽  
Samuli Laato ◽  
A K M Najmul Islam
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Partial Least Square ◽  
Least Square ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Living Situation ◽  
The Impact

Background During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, governments issued movement restrictions and placed areas into quarantine to combat the spread of the disease. In addition, individuals were encouraged to adopt personal health measures such as social isolation. Information regarding the disease and recommended avoidance measures were distributed through a variety of channels including social media, news websites, and emails. Previous research suggests that the vast amount of available information can be confusing, potentially resulting in overconcern and information overload. Objective This study investigates the impact of online information on the individual-level intention to voluntarily self-isolate during the pandemic. Using the protection-motivation theory as a framework, we propose a model outlining the effects of cyberchondria and information overload on individuals’ perceptions and motivations. Methods To test the proposed model, we collected data with an online survey (N=225) and analyzed it using partial least square-structural equation modeling. The effects of social media and living situation were tested through multigroup analysis. Results Cyberchondria and information overload had a significant impact on individuals’ threat and coping perceptions, and through them on self-isolation intention. Among the appraisal constructs, perceived severity (P=.002) and self-efficacy (P=.003) positively impacted self-isolation intention, while response cost (P<.001) affected the intention negatively. Cyberchondria (P=.003) and information overload (P=.003) indirectly affected self-isolation intention through the aforementioned perceptions. Using social media as an information source increased both cyberchondria and information overload. No differences in perceptions were found between people living alone and those living with their families. Conclusions During COVID-19, frequent use of social media contributed to information overload and overconcern among individuals. To boost individuals’ motivation to adopt preventive measures such as self-isolation, actions should focus on lowering individuals’ perceived response costs in addition to informing them about the severity of the situation.

scholarly journals Intentional or inadvertent fake news sharing? Fact-checking warnings and users’ interaction with social media content

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Ardèvol-Abreu ◽  
Patricia Delponti ◽  
Carmen Rodríguez-Wangüemert
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Fact Checking ◽  
False News ◽  
News Sharing

The main social media platforms have been implementing strategies to minimize fake news dissemination. These include identifying, labeling, and penalizing –via news feed ranking algorithms– fake publications. Part of the rationale behind this approach is that the negative effects of fake content arise only when social media users are deceived. Once debunked, fake posts and news stories should therefore become harmless. Unfortunately, the literature shows that the effects of misinformation are more complex and tend to persist and even backfire after correction. Furthermore, we still do not know much about how social media users evaluate content that has been fact-checked and flagged as false. More worryingly, previous findings suggest that some people may intentionally share made up news on social media, although their motivations are not fully explained. To better understand users’ interaction with social media content identified or recognized as false, we analyze qualitative and quantitative data from five focus groups and a sub-national online survey (N = 350). Findings suggest that the label of ‘false news’ plays a role –although not necessarily central– in social media users’ evaluation of the content and their decision (not) to share it. Some participants showed distrust in fact-checkers and lack of knowledge about the fact-checking process. We also found that fake news sharing is a two-dimensional phenomenon that includes intentional and unintentional behaviors. We discuss some of the reasons why some of social media users may choose to distribute fake news content intentionally.

scholarly journals Impact of Online Information on Self-Isolation Intention During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sectional Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Farooq ◽  
Samuli Laato ◽  
A K M Najmul Islam
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Partial Least Square ◽  
Least Square ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Living Situation ◽  
The Impact

BACKGROUND During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, governments issued movement restrictions and placed areas into quarantine to combat the spread of the disease. In addition, individuals were encouraged to adopt personal health measures such as social isolation. Information regarding the disease and recommended avoidance measures were distributed through a variety of channels including social media, news websites, and emails. Previous research suggests that the vast amount of available information can be confusing, potentially resulting in overconcern and information overload. OBJECTIVE This study investigates the impact of online information on the individual-level intention to voluntarily self-isolate during the pandemic. Using the protection-motivation theory as a framework, we propose a model outlining the effects of cyberchondria and information overload on individuals’ perceptions and motivations. METHODS To test the proposed model, we collected data with an online survey (N=225) and analyzed it using partial least square-structural equation modeling. The effects of social media and living situation were tested through multigroup analysis. RESULTS Cyberchondria and information overload had a significant impact on individuals’ threat and coping perceptions, and through them on self-isolation intention. Among the appraisal constructs, perceived severity (<i>P</i>=.002) and self-efficacy (<i>P</i>=.003) positively impacted self-isolation intention, while response cost (<i>P</i>&lt;.001) affected the intention negatively. Cyberchondria (<i>P</i>=.003) and information overload (<i>P</i>=.003) indirectly affected self-isolation intention through the aforementioned perceptions. Using social media as an information source increased both cyberchondria and information overload. No differences in perceptions were found between people living alone and those living with their families. CONCLUSIONS During COVID-19, frequent use of social media contributed to information overload and overconcern among individuals. To boost individuals’ motivation to adopt preventive measures such as self-isolation, actions should focus on lowering individuals’ perceived response costs in addition to informing them about the severity of the situation.

Arresting fake news sharing on social media: a theory of planned behavior approach

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vartika Pundir ◽  
Elangbam Binodini Devi ◽  
Vishnu Nath
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Theory Of Planned Behavior ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Planned Behavior ◽  
Behavioral Control ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Perceived Behavioral Control ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
News Sharing

Purpose This study aims to examine the collective impact of awareness and knowledge about fake news, attitudes toward news verification, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, fear of missing out (FoMO) and sadism on social media users’ intention to verify news before sharing on social media. Design/methodology/approach The current study’s conceptual framework is developed by a comprehensive literature review on social networking and the theory of planned behavior. The data for samples were collected from 400 respondents in India to test the conceptual framework using the partial least square–structural equation modeling technique. Findings The results show that awareness and knowledge, perceived behavioral control, attitudes toward news verification and FoMO are significant predictors of intention to verify news before sharing. Research limitations/implications The present study concludes implications for managers of social media companies and policy actors that want to take steps toward arresting the spread of fake news via social media. Originality/value Academic investigation on fake news sharing on social media has recently gained traction. The current work is unique because it uses the theory of planned behavior as a basis for predicting social media user’s intention to verify news before sharing on social media.

Message sharing and verification behaviour on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: a study in the context of India and the USA

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anumegha Sharma ◽  
Payal S. Kapoor
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Health Anxiety ◽  
Study Finding ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Message Type

PurposeTechnology has eased access to information. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ease of access and transmission of information via social media has led to ambiguity, misinformation and uncertainty. This research studies the aforementioned behaviours of information sharing and verification related to COVID-19, in the context of social media.Design/methodology/approachTwo studies have been carried out. Study 1, with Indian social media users, is a two-factor between-subjects experimental design that investigated the effect of message polarity (positive versus negative) and message type (news versus rumour) on the dissemination and verification behaviour of COVID-19-related messages. The study also investigated the mediation of perceived message importance and health anxiety. Study 2 is a replica study conducted with US users.FindingsThe study finding revealed significantly higher message sharing for news than rumour. Further, for the Indian users, message with positive polarity led to higher message sharing and message with negative polarity led to higher verification behaviour. On the contrary, for the US users, message with negative polarity led to higher message sharing and message with positive polarity led to higher verification behaviour. Finally, the study revealed message importance mediates the relationship of message type and message sharing behaviour for Indian and US users; however, health anxiety mediation was significant only for Indian users.Practical implicationsThe findings offer important implications related to information regulation during a health crisis. Unverified information sharing is harmful during a pandemic. The study sheds light on this behaviour such that stakeholders get insights and better manage the information being disseminated.Originality/valueThe study investigates the behaviour of sharing and verification of social media messages between users containing health information (news and rumour) related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2020-0282

Modeling Real and Fake News Sharing in Social Networks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abishai Joy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Survival Analysis ◽  
Diffusion Of Innovation ◽  
Absolute Error ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Fake News ◽  
High Dependency ◽  
Binary Classifiers ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
News Sharing

Online media is changing the traditional news industry and diminishing the role of journalists, newspapers, and even news channels. This in turn is enhancing the ability of fake news to influence public opinion on important topics. The threat of fake news is quite imminent, as it allows malicious users to share their agenda with a larger audience. Major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., are making it easy to spread fake news due to the minimal moderation/ fact-checking on these platforms. This work aims at predicting fake and real news sharing in social media. Specifically, we employ a multi-level influence, drawn from the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory on a real-world dataset and predict whether and when a given user will share information in social media. We hypothesize that fake and real news sharing is better predicted by considering user, news, and network-level feature attributes together. We are also predicting the time elapsed between the influencer and follower shares via survival analysis. Binary classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, etc. are used for the prediction of fake and real news sharing. This approach is demonstrated using a dataset comprising 1,572 users that are sampled from the FakeNewsNet repository. Our results show a 30% increase in the Area Under Receiver Operation Characteristics (AUROC) in comparison to the best baseline. Real and fake news sharing shows high dependency on user similarity, tie strength, and explicit features. Furthermore, the analysis shows that users with characteristic features like love, self-transcendence, ideals, conservation, and openness to change tend to share real news, whereas users with dominant features like self-enhancement, curiosity, closeness, structure, and harmony are more likely to share fake news. Finally, survival analysis is employed to predict the time elapsed between influencer and follower shares. The Concordance Index (C-Index) for real news sharing is slightly lower compared to the baseline, and the C-Index of Random Survival Forest (RSF) is comparable to the baseline for fake news sharing. Furthermore, in comparison to the regression baseline models, the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is significantly less in RSF for both real and fake news sharing.

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