This study analyzes N=181 social media rumors from Bangladesh to find out the most popular themes, sources, and aims The result shows that social media rumors have seven popular themes: political, health & education, crime & human rights, religious, religiopolitical, entertainment, and other Also, online media and mainstream media are the two main sources of social media rumors, along with three tentative aims: positive, negative, and unknown A few major findings of this research are: Political rumors dominate social media, but its percentage is decreasing, while religion-related rumors are increasing;most of the social media rumors are negative and emerge from online media, and social media itself is the dominant online source of social media rumors;and, most of the health-related rumors are negative and surge during a crisis period, such as the COVID-19 pandemic This paper identifies some of its limitations with the data collection period, data source, and data analysis Providing a few research directions, this study also elucidates the contributions of its results in academia and policymaking © 2020 All Rights Reserved
Social Media Rumors in Bangladesh