A Closer Look at the Self-Correcting Crowd

Abstract

This paper examines how users of social media correct online rumors during crisis events. Focusing on Twitter, we identify different patterns of information correcting behaviors and describe the actions, motivations, rationalizations and experiences of people who exhibited them. To do this, we analyze digital traces across two separate crisis events and interviews of fifteen individuals who generated some of those traces. Salient themes ensuing from this work help us describe: 1) different mechanisms of corrective action with respect to who gets corrected and how; 2) how responsibility is positioned for verifying and correcting information; and 3) how users' imagined audience influences their corrective strategy. We synthesize these three components into a preliminary model and explore the role of imagined audiences-both who those audiences are and how they react to and interact with shared information-in shaping users' decisions about whether and how to correct rumors.