Abstract
As the use of social media platforms has increased, so have they become a new domain in information warfare. Before tackling the roots or spread of misinformation or disinformation, it is important to understand why people share any information on social media at all. This book presents a broad, multidisciplinary review and creation of a theoretical framework of the factors that have been shown to, or might, influence sharing information on social media, regardless of its veracity. The act of sharing information online is made up of several categories of factors: sources of messages, reactions to the original message and messenger, the motivation to share, the ability to share (and perception of the ability to share), and then, of course, actual sharing behavior. In addition, while genuine actors may have reactions to the original message and messenger, there also exist non-genuine actors that have pre-programmed or pre-planned reactions. We also qualitatively examined 20 fake news stories in two different languages as they appeared in social media in order to illustrate factors affecting information propagation and identify potential gaps in the literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Fake news historically has included yellow journalism and other information in news media that is deliberately inaccurate or misleading. For most of this book, we use the term ‘fake news’ to refer to “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 213). Note that intent is hard to prove, and propaganda can include a mix of falsehood and truth. Although we will refer to ’fake news,’ particularly in reference to the corpus we analyze, we will often also refer to the more technical terms of misinformation and disinformation (Cooke, 2017). Fake news may include one or both types. While disinformation is intentionally untrue, misinformation may have elements of truth in it (Cooke, 2017).
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Paletz, S.B.F., Auxier, B.E., Golonka, E.M. (2019). Introduction. In: A Multidisciplinary Framework of Information Propagation Online. SpringerBriefs in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16413-3_1
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