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As U.S. election looms, this ‘rumor researcher’ tracks—and combats—falsehoods in real time | Science | AAAS

After the war, Japanese American researcher Tamotsu Shibutani helped change how rumors were seen, casting them as a rational response to disasters and uncertainty. To Shibutani, who had spent the war imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in California, rumor was more of a verb than a noun, a collective process of making sense of the world. His view was heavily influenced by his experience in the camp, Starbird notes, where the community used rumors to try and cope with the “horrible uncertainty” they faced. “In times of crisis and anxiety and these kinds of conditions, to participate in rumoring is a natural thing to do, and then there’s other folks that are going to exploit that,” she says. “Those dynamics have always been there.” Starbird initially expected her research to tell a positive story: how rumors spread by some users are quickly fact checked and corrected by others. “I’d sort of seen that in the early data, where we would see rumors and misinformation, but they were quickly corrected,” Starbird says. “They weren’t causing a lot of damage, as far as we could tell.” It was the idea of a self-correcting crowd, a kind of Wikipedia in the wild. But her first few studies quickly disabused her of this notion. “We could really see, especially between 2013 and 2015, that rumors and misinformation were becoming a larger and larger part of the discourse online during these crisis events,” she says. Rumors were rarely being corrected—and when they were, the correction usually came too late and reached far fewer people than the original, false information. A rumor that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack by Navy SEALs, for instance, circulated on Twitter (now X) for days. Social media algorithms, designed to keep people’s attention, often advantaged the sensational. “And it turns out that falsehoods and conspiracy theories tend to be more sensational than the truth,” Starbird says.
#narratives #history #stress #cult #rumors - science.org