Abstract

The Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter. As information spread, it was filled with rumors (unsubstantiated information), and many of these rumors contained misinformation. Earlier studies have suggested that crowdsourced information flows can correct misinformation, and our research investigates this proposition. This exploratory research examines three rumors, later demonstrated to be false, that circulated on Twitter in the aftermath of the bombings. Our findings suggest that corrections to the misinformation emerge but are muted compared with the propagation of the misinformation. The similarities and differences we observe in the patterns of the misinformation and corrections contained within the stream over the days that followed the attacks suggest directions for possible research strategies to automatically detect misinformation.

Keywords

MisinformationFLAGS registerComputer securityComputer science

MeSH Terms

HumansFemaleMaleMiddle AgedAdultSmokingPoliticsUSSRCross-Sectional StudiesAdolescentYoung AdultIntentionAgedMoldovaVoting

Affiliated Institutions

Related Publications

Enquiring Minds

Zhe Zhao , Paul Resnick , Qiaozhu Mei

Many previous techniques identify trending topics in social media, even topics that are not pre-defined. We present a technique to identify trending rumors, which we define as t...

2015 Proceedings of the 24th International... 594 citations

Faking Sandy

Aditi Gupta , Hemank Lamba , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru +1 more

In today’s world, online social media plays a vital role during real world events, especially crisis events. There are both positive and negative effects of social media coverage...

2013 Proceedings of the 22nd International... 561 citations

Publication Info

Year
2014
Type
article
Citations
421
Access
Closed

External Links

Download PDF (Free) View on DOI.org PubMed Semantic Scholar

Social Impact

Altmetric
PlumX Metrics

Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions

Citation Metrics

421
OpenAlex
25
Influential
75
CrossRef

Cite This

Kate Starbird, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand et al. (2014). Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. iConference 2014 Proceedings . https://doi.org/10.9776/14308

Identifiers

DOI
10.9776/14308
PMID
40274912
PMCID
PMC12022174

Data Quality

Data completeness: 86%