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You are lying! How misinformation accusations spread on Twitter

You are lying! How misinformation accusations spread on Twitter Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.FindingsThe study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.Practical implicationsThe authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.Social implicationsEarly identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.Originality/valueStrategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Internet Research Emerald Publishing

You are lying! How misinformation accusations spread on Twitter

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References (70)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
© Emerald Publishing Limited
ISSN
1066-2243
DOI
10.1108/intr-07-2022-0572
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.FindingsThe study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.Practical implicationsThe authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.Social implicationsEarly identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.Originality/valueStrategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.

Journal

Internet Research – Emerald Publishing

Published: Nov 20, 2023

Keywords: Misinformation accusations; Misinformation; Lies; Fake news; Regulatory mode; Locomotion; Conservatives; Liberals; Political orientation; Social media; Twitter; Text analysis

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