Exploring the Dynamics of Justification in the Wake of a Rumor Outbreak on Social Media

This paper explores the dynamics of justification in the wake of a rumor outbreak on social media. Specifically, it examines the extent to which the five types of justification—descriptive argumentation, presumptive argumentation, evidentialism, truth skepticism, and epistemological skepticism—manif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of knowledge management 2022-01, Vol.18 (1), p.1-15
Main Authors: Chua, Alton Y. K, Banerjee, Snehasish, Pal, Anjan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Constructivism
Content analysis
Digital media
Epistemology
Gossip
Information sharing
Knowledge management
Outbreaks
Public relations
Skepticism
Social construction
Social media
Social networks
Tabulation
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Summary:This paper explores the dynamics of justification in the wake of a rumor outbreak on social media. Specifically, it examines the extent to which the five types of justification—descriptive argumentation, presumptive argumentation, evidentialism, truth skepticism, and epistemological skepticism—manifested in different voices including pro-rumor, anti-rumor and doubts before and after fact-checking. Content analysis was employed on 1,911 tweets related to a rumor outbreak. Non-parametric cross-tabulation was used to uncover nuances in information sharing before and after fact-checking. Augmenting the literature which suggests the online community’s susceptibility to hoaxes, the paper offers a silver lining: Users are responsible enough to correct rumors during the later phase of a rumor lifecycle. This sense of public-spiritedness can be harnessed by knowledge management practitioners and public relations professionals for crowdsourced rumor refutation.
ISSN:1548-0666
1548-0658
DOI:10.4018/IJKM.291100