Twitter Rumours at the 'Pre-News' Phase

The final speaker in this ECREA 2014 session is Scott Eldridge, whose interest is in the role of rumour and gossip as 'pre-news'. Rumour is institutionally unfounded, and is not part of the discourse of journalistic products – but it is a kind of reality-testing especially when insufficient verified facts are available.

Rumour is the intervention of the unauthorised voice within the flow of information, then. It is a perishable commodity, and historically the development of formal news reporting is a process of sequestering rumour to a handful of defined categories (letters to the editor, comments, vox pops) that are clearly distinct from 'proper' news.

Social media like Twitter provide a space where rumour can exist, but also where rumour can become news, and the language of tweets around the time of such transformations is worth exploring. This is especially relevant at the earliest stages of a news event, at or before the transition from ambient to central news – what Scott calls the 'pre-news' phase.

But how can such processes be analysed as patterns, abstracted from actual events? Scott captured tweets about the downing of MH17 and the emerging Ebola crisis, and manually analysed a small sample of such data; MH17 tweets were widely retweeted (using manual retweets), without much active engagement; Ebola tweets showed a great deal more rumour discussion and engagement.

MH17 at the start had a strongly international focus, with few outright attacks against stakeholders but significant speculation over who was to blame; Ebola showed mainly US engagement, strong signs of panic, very partisan attacks and flaming, and some conspiracy theories. This is a distinction between an ambient focus and an already aware focus; the former feeds back into a news discourse, while the latter largely remains on Twitter.