As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grow, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven information can quickly and seamlessly spread online, deceiving people or influencing their opinions. Also, the increased engagement of tightly knit communities, such as Reddit and 4chan, further compounds the problem, as their users initiate and propagate alternative information, not only within their own communities, but also to different ones as well as various social media. In fact, these platforms have become an important piece of the modern information ecosystem, which, thus far, has not been studied as a whole. In this paper, we begin to fill this gap by studying mainstream and alternative news shared on Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. By analyzing millions of posts around several axes, we measure how mainstream and alternative news flows between these platforms. Our results indicate that alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit can have a surprising level of influence on Twitter, providing evidence that "fringe" communities often succeed in spreading alternative news to mainstream social networks and the greater Web.
In this paper we highlight three distinct approaches to studying rumor dynamicsâ volume, exposure, and content production. Expanding upon prior work, which has focused on rumor volume, we argue that considering the size of the exposed population is a vital component of understanding rumoring. Additionally, by combining all three approaches we discover subtle features of rumoring behavior that would have been missed by applying each approach in isolation. Using a case study of rumoring on Twitter during a hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, we apply a mixed-methods framework to explore rumoring and its consequences through these three lenses, focusing on the added dimension of exposure in particular. Our approach demonstrates the importance of considering both rumor content and the people engaging with rumor content to arrive at a more holistic understanding of communication dynamics. These results have implications for emergency responders and official use of social media during crisis management. In this article we explore the behavior of Twitter users under an emergency situation. In particular, we analyze the activity related to the 2010 earthquake in Chile and characterize Twitter in the hours and days following this disaster. Furthermore, we perform a preliminary study of certain social phenomenons, such as the dissemination of false rumors and confirmed news. We analyze how this information propagated through the Twitter network, with the purpose of assessing the reliability of Twitter as an information source under extreme circumstances. Our analysis shows that the propagation of tweets that correspond to rumors differs from tweets that spread news because rumors tend to be questioned more than news by the Twitter community. This result shows that it is posible to detect rumors by using aggregate analysis on tweets. This paper examines how â officialâ accounts participate in the propagation and correction of online rumors in the context of crisis events. Using an emerging method for interpretive analysis of â bigâ social data, we investigate the spread of online rumors through digital tracesâ in this case, tweets. Our study suggests that official accounts can help to slow the spread of a rumor by posting a denial, andâ supported by reflections from an organization that recently dealt with a rumor-crisisâ offers best practices for organizations around social media strategies and protocols. Based on tweet data and connections to existing literature, we also demonstrate and discuss how mainstream media participate in rumoring, and note the role of a new breed of online media, â breaking newsâ accounts. This analysis offers a complementary perspective to existing studies that use surveys and interviews to characterize the role official accounts play in online rumoring. We discuss the way of hoax spreading as gossip and rumor throughout the social media, i.e.: Twitter, by observing an empirical case in Indonesia. We discuss the spreading factor of the gossip in the social media and see the epidemiology of the propagation hoax before and after the hoax being clarified in the conventional mass media. The discussions brought us to the open enrchiment analysis of the sociology of gossip and rumors within the online services like Twitter for future observation of human behavior.