Rumors and factitious informational blends: The role of the web in speculative politics

The World Wide Web has changed the dynamics of information transmission and agenda-setting. Facts mingle with half-truths and untruths to create factitious informational blends (FIBs) that drive speculative politics. We specify an information environment that mirrors and contributes to a polarized political system and develop a methodology that measures the interaction of the two. We do so by examining the evolution of two comparable claims during the 2004 presidential campaign in three streams of data: (1) web pages, (2) Google searches, and (3) media coverage. We find that the web is not sufficient alone for spreading misinformation, but it leads the agenda for traditional media. We find no evidence for equality of influence in network actors.

[1]  R. H. Knapp,et al.  A PSYCHOLOGY OF RUMOR , 1944 .

[2]  Leo Postman,et al.  AN ANALYSIS OF RUMOR , 1946 .

[3]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  Friendship as Social process: a substantive and methodological analysis , 1964 .

[4]  Patricia A. Turner,et al.  Church's Fried Chicken and The Klan: A Rhetorical Analysis of Rumor in the Black Community , 1987 .

[5]  P. Shoemaker.  Communication Campaigns about Drugs : Government, Media, and the Public , 1989 .

[6]  R. L. Rosnow.  Inside rumor: A personal journey. , 1991 .

[7]  M. Roberts,et al.  Agenda setting and political advertising: Origins of the news agenda , 1994 .

[8]  E. López-Escobar,et al.  Two Levels of Agenda Setting Among Advertising and News in the 1995 Spanish Elections , 1998 .

[9]  Rajeev Motwani,et al.  The PageRank Citation Ranking : Bringing Order to the Web , 1999, WWW 1999.

[10]  Mathew D. McCubbins,et al.  Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality , 2000 .

[11]  Charles S. Taber,et al.  Elements of Reason: Three Steps toward a Theory of Motivated Political Reasoning , 2000 .

[12]  M. McPherson,et al.  Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks , 2001 .

[13]  C. Granger.  Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods , 1969 .

[14]  T. P. Boyle.  Intermedia Agenda Setting in the 1996 Presidential Election , 2001 .

[15]  David P. Redlawsk.  Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making , 2002, The Journal of Politics.

[16]  Evert A. Lindquist,et al.  Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada , 2004, Perspectives on Politics.

[17]  Kathleen D. Vohs,et al.  Gossip as Cultural Learning , 2004 .

[18]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog , 2005, LinkKDD '05.

[19]  Joe Bob Hester.  Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion , 2005 .

[20]  Nan Zheng,et al.  Issue Publics on the Web: Applying Network Theory to the War Blogosphere , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[21]  Stewart Clegg.  The bounds of rationality , 2006 .

[22]  Kevin Wallsten.  Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere: An Analysis of the Relationship between Mainstream Media and Political Blogs , 2007 .

[23]  D. Watts,et al.  Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation , 2007 .

[24]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  The dynamics of viral marketing , 2005, EC '06.

[25]  Peter Jacques,et al.  The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism , 2008 .

[26]  R. Garrett.  Politically Motivated Reinforcement Seeking: Reframing the Selective Exposure Debate , 2009 .

[27]  R. Kelly Garrett,et al.  Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users , 2009, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[28]  Philip Barker,et al.  Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From Production to Produsage , 2009 .

[29]  Christopher R. Martin,et al.  How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting , 2010, Perspectives on Politics.

[30]  Brian E. Weeks,et al.  The Symbiosis of News Coverage and Aggregate Online Search Behavior: Obama, Rumors, and Presidential Politics , 2010 .

[31]  E. David,et al.  Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World , 2010 .

[32]  Mahmoud Fouz,et al.  Social Networks Spread Rumors in Sublogarithmic Time , 2011, Electron. Notes Discret. Math..

[33]  N. Stroud.  Niche News: The Politics of News Choice , 2011 .

[34]  Bruce Garrison,et al.  Study Shows Some Blogs Affect Traditional News Media Agendas , 2011 .

[35]  Mahmoud Fouz,et al.  Social networks spread rumors in sublogarithmic time , 2011, STOC '11.

[36]  Sharon Meraz.  Using Time Series Analysis to Measure Intermedia Agenda-Setting Influence in Traditional Media and Political Blog Networks , 2011 .

[37]  Adam J. Berinsky,et al.  Rumors, Truths, and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation , 2011 .

[38]  James N. Danziger,et al.  The Internet electorate , 2011, Commun. ACM.

[39]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Everyone's an influencer: quantifying influence on twitter , 2011, WSDM '11.

[40]  Massimo Franceschet,et al.  PageRank , 2010, Commun. ACM.

[41]  R. Garrett.  Troubling Consequences of Online Political Rumoring , 2011 .

[42]  Sharon Meraz.  The fight for ‘how to think’: Traditional media, social networks, and issue interpretation , 2011 .

[43]  Yamir Moreno,et al.  Absence of influential spreaders in rumor dynamics , 2011, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[44]  Cass R. Sunstein.  Believing False Rumors , 2012 .

[45]  R. Entman.  Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct , 2012 .

[46]  Chris Arney,et al.  Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World (Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J.; 2010) [Book Review] , 2013, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

[47]  Zizi Papacharissi,et al.  Networked Gatekeeping and Networked Framing on #Egypt , 2013 .

[48]  J. Groshek,et al.  Agenda Trending: Reciprocity and the Predictive Capacity of Social Networking Sites in Intermedia Agenda Setting across Topics over Time , 2013 .

[49]  R. Garrett,et al.  A Turn Toward Avoidance? Selective Exposure to Online Political Information, 2004–2008 , 2013 .

[50]  Bernard P. Brooks,et al.  Rumor clustering, consensus, and polarization: Dynamic social impact and self-organization of hearsay , 2013 .

[51]  David Amerland,et al.  Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic, Increase Brand Impact, and Amplify Your Online Presence , 2013 .

[52]  Chris J. Vargo,et al.  Network Issue Agendas on Twitter During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election , 2014 .