Online Rumor Transmission and Information Cascade
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378720617309059
As the researchers pointed out, the Internet and online platforms have dramatically changed the speed of the spread of information. In particular, their proliferation has increased the spread of online rumors. Having around three billion online users globally, comments and opinions are exchanged in an unrestricted way, which “potentially can propagate numerous negative online rumors.” Many companies, such as Starbuck, and Michael Kors, are hurt by the transmission and experienced significant losses. Numerous rumors of two candidates emerged throughout the entire presidential election in 2016. Manipulation of social media posts and comments have a greater impact than traditional word-of-mouth dissemination of information. It was found that many choices of products, like software downloads and online book purchases, show distinct jump and drops with changes in ranking. The researchers pointed out some influential factors of online rumors transmission. For example, group arguments, or the collective comments made by all the participants in the online community, can greatly affect the scale of spread because they tend to be more polarized than the initial inclination of group members. Argument volume and consistency on rumor belief interact greatly with the belief change. In other words, the scale of arguments has a much stronger influence on user belief when all arguments express the same opinion. However, having a big volume on itself is not enough to shake someone’s belief.
One major factor of online rumor transmission, group arguments, is carried out through the mechanism of information facade as we discussed in class. The anonymity of social media allows users to share opinions freely, but makes it difficult to confirm source reliability. Without knowing much about the poster’s private information, readers can only observe and follow others’ behavior, which is the information cascade effect. As we proved in class, information cascades can be misleading because the consistency of only a few initial opinions has the potential to create positive/negative cascades. In an online forum, “the collective opinion of participants can become an informational reference point for another user. Eventually, this could lead to a herding effect.” As we showed in class, only 2 positive comments are enough to alter the third user’s opinion to positive in Herding Experiment.