This project focuses on understanding the spread of false information during responses to natural disasters and on the development of new techniques to prevent the spread of false information in social media. For example, after the March 11, 2011 major earthquake in Japan, social media such as Twitter played an important role in sharing information and coordinating disaster response. However, social media were also used by some people to spread false information about radiation and supplies, potentially creating widespread panic. The goals of this project are to better understand how false information is spread via Twitter after an emergency and to develop and evaluate new techniques to prevent the spread of false information. To achieve these goals, the investigators will build a visualization tool to measure the effectiveness of counteracting tweets that question the accuracy of false tweets and conduct experiments with university students in Japan and USA in which subjects' familiarity with and likelihood of spreading different types of false and counteracting tweets are measured.
Intellectual Merit: The project will provide new insights into the factors that determine the spread of false information, as well a set of recommendations for reducing this spread. The project will also contribute new methods for analyzing the spread of information in social media.
Broader Impacts: The insights and tools provided by the project will benefit future disaster response efforts by allowing emergency personnel to detect when false information is being spread and intervene to counteract the effects of false information before negative societal effects such as panic occur.
During a disaster, social media can be a source of inaccurate rumors. For example, in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, false tweets confused citizens and sometimes interfered with the discovery of actionable information. This project focused on understanding the spread of false information in social media during responses to natural disasters and on the development of new techniques to reduce the spread of false information in social media. The investigators built a visualization tool to measure the spread of tweets. They developed and evaluated crowd-based techniques that analyzed the information sharing behavior of humans in social media. They conducted experiments in Japan and USA in which they measured subjects’ perceptions of and likelihood of spreading different types of false and counteracting tweets under different conditions suggested by the techniques. Intellectual Merit: The results provided new insights into psychological factors that determine the spread of false information in social media during disaster response. Perceived importance, accuracy, familiarity, and informativeness of the information as well as the ease and anxiety associated with processing the information were good predictors of its spread. Collective opinion such as aggregate re-tweeting counts and credibility scores could change how people perceive the unverified information and reduce its spread. Moreover, exposing people to information that counteracts false information could change how people perceive the false information and reduce its spread. However, it could be difficult to completely eliminate the spread of false information. Some people kept spreading information that they knew was questionable or even false. Broader Impacts: The results suggested a set of recommendations for reducing the spread of false information in social media during crisis response. Crowdsourcing critical-thinking and credibility evaluation could be effective in reducing the spread of misinformation and in supporting the discovery of relevant information in social media during disaster response. The insights and tools from the project could benefit future disaster response efforts by improving people's social media literacy and allowing emergency personnel to detect the spread of false information and to intervene to counteract the effects of false information before negative societal effects such as panic and unnecessary distress occur.
