Toward understanding how users respond to rumours in social media

As the spread of rumours has been increasing every day in online social networks (OSNs), it is important to analyze and understand this phenomenon. Damage caused by the spread of rumours is difficult to handle without a full understanding of the dynamics behind it. One of the central steps of understanding rumour spread is to analyze who spread rumours online, why, and how. In this research, we focus on the steps who and why by describing, implementing, and evaluating an approach that studies whether or not a group of users is actively involved in rumour discussions, and assesses rumour-spreading personality types in OSNs. We implement this general approach using Reddit data, and demonstrate its use by determining which users engage with a recurring rumour, and analyzing their comments using qualitative methods. We find that we can reliably classify users into one of three categories: (1) “Generally support a false rumour”, (2) “Generally refute a false rumour”, or (3) “Generally joke about a false rumour”. Combining text mining techniques, such as text classification, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis, we aim to identify and classify those rumour-spreading user categories automatically and provide a more holistic view of rumour spread in OSNs.