Rumour Transmission through Social Networking

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Yuqiong Zhou, whose interest is in how rumours are transmitted on the Internet - in this case, through the Chinese messaging service QQ. Rumour transmission is driven by personal anxiety and social disorder, and propelled by people's belief in the rumours; this transmission, in turn, further deepens their belief in rumours. Rumours are unverified but broadly circulated information items which yield from people's discussion and constitute a kind of abnormal public opinion.

We tend to believe rumours that look real, come from normally reliable sources, and support our preconceived notions; we tend to retransmit rumours that we believe. In the process, some details are lost (leveled), some are emphasised (sharpening), some are added - and through this process, rumours are assimilated into (made more similar to) our existing beliefs, and we believe them even more strongly.

Online, we should be able to more readily check rumours for accuracy, and simply copy and paste rumours verbatim, so these processes of change during transmission should not take place as strongly - but we also face an information overload and often do not engage in sufficient fact-checking to counteract false rumours.

Rumour experiments tend to engage in the serial transmission of rumours to study how they are transmitted (levelling and sharpening occur) or in the discussion of rumours to study group dynamics (during which adding and sharpening occur); Yuqiong's project utilised both approaches in the context of discussions of the Beijing Olympics on QQ - it launched rumours that the opening fireworks had caused environmental pollution, that workers on the Bird's Nest stadium had died, etc.

Participants were found to believe rumours because of their original sources, the quality of text, photos, advertisements, and links on the Websites, their cognitive consistency, and the context of hearing the rumours; they also actively verified those rumours through group collaboration, however, and were influenced to some extent by external factors (a rumour claiming to stem from a BBC report was more readily disbelieved for nationalistic reasons, for example, even though it had been made to look highly official).

Participants who trusted the rumours were more likely to pass them on in full (copying and pasting), while disbelieving participants may only pass on the link and/or headline. Levelling and sharpening occurred through simplification and a selective focussing on specific aspects; rumours were reconstructed through a collective addition of further information by the group, and in the process communally held beliefs were introduced by the group. Importantly, belief in rumours declined after longer QQ discussion; the flip side of the coin, however, is that less discussed rumours continued to be viewed as more trustworthy.

Technorati : China, Internet Turning 40, QQ, rumours, social networking, transmission
Del.icio.us : China, Internet Turning 40, QQ, rumours, social networking, transmission