Rumors.
Violetta Wagganer
As a verb, rumor means to spread or report rumors. When used this way, it is usually accompanied by the thing that is a rumor, as in It has been rumored that Disney is building a new amusement park outside the city.
People are fascinated by rumors. Magazines and celebrity gossip publications often dedicate entire issues to spreading rumors about famous people. Rumors allow our imagination to run wild, which is probably why we enjoy hearing them.
Around the time the US government was testing nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll in the spring of 1954, residents of Bellingham, Washington, inspected their windshields and noticed holes, pits, and other damage. Some blamed vandals, perhaps teenagers with BB guns. Once Bellingham residents reported the pits, people in nearby towns inspected their windshields and found similar damage. Could sand fleas have caused it? Or cosmic rays? As more people examined their windshields and found more pits, a frightening hypothesis emerged: nuclear fallout from government hydrogen bomb testing. Within a week, people around Seattle, 90 miles away, were reporting damage as well.
Today this phenomenon would probably be described using the terms misinformation, disinformation, and perhaps fake news. Certainly, communication has changed dramatically since party-line telephone calls and black-and-white television, but scholarship from that era holds critical insights that are essential to the digital era. The study of rumors, which surged around World War II, is still very relevant.
Our team of researchers at the University of Washington have been investigating these issues for more than a decade. Initially, we centered our research on rumors. But we shifted focus in 2016 as public and academic attention lasered onto misinformation and social media manipulation. By 2020, our collaborators in an effort called the Election Integrity Partnership had developed an analytical framework that allowed dozens of students to scour social media platforms in parallel, feeding information to trained researchers for analysis and to authorities and communicators for potential mitigation. As we worked to build ways to quickly prioritize unsubstantiated claims about election processes and results, we found that the terms misinformation and disinformation were often cumbersome, confusing, or even inaccurate. But we came full circle in 2022, during a second iteration of our collaboration on election integrity, because the concept of rumors worked easily and consistently to assess the potential for unsubstantiated claims to go viral online.
When our research team tracked the use of social media in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, we grounded our work in scholarship of offline rumors. Both events catalyzed numerous rumors: conspiracy theories warning about an impending sea floor collapse, crowd-sleuthed identifications of (innocent) suspects. We uncovered similar patterns in dozens of subsequent events where rumors circulated on social media, including a WestJet plane hijacking (that did not happen), multiple mass shootings in the United States, the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine, and terrorist attacks in Sydney, Australia, in 2014 and Paris, France, in 2015.
Assessing these dimensions helps predict which rumors will become viral. Take the 1950s Seattle windshield pitting epidemic: the underlying conditions included high uncertainty about both the cause of the windshield damage and the risks of nuclear fallout. The features of the rumor included high significance if the nuclear connection were true; substantial novelty, as both car ownership and concerns about nuclear weapons had become widespread in the years since World War II; high emotional valence pegged to nuclear fears as well as property damage; and compelling evidence, since people could see dings on their own cars and photographs of others. The system effects included participatory potential as people inspected and discussed their own cars. And, if contemporaneous accounts are true, the rumor declined because of high trust in the authorities who were debunking it.
Though we developed techniques to classify rumors specifically for elections, we see potential for much wider application. Communicators can use the framework to assess vulnerability to rumors and to prepare for outbreaks or other foreseeable crises. Evaluating rumors across multiple dimensions for potential virality can be more useful than deciding whether to apply a label like misinformation or disinformation. It may not be worth drawing attention to a rumor likely to lapse, but it would be valuable to correct a harmful false rumor with high spread potential before it gets started. Such insights can inform how to focus crisis communication, platform moderation, or fact-checking resources.
Certainly, this framework cannot capture everything worthy of consideration. Practitioners should examine potential virality in tandem with the potential for harm. There are probably also productive approaches for refocusing the lens around misinformation and disinformation. For example, the term misinformation likely remains a better fit for describing false claims spread through low-quality scientific journals, and propaganda might better capture concerted efforts to manipulate the masses. Disinformation is useful for intentionally misleading and clearly manipulative campaigns.
Making the right calls on information is crucial because these phenomena are now inherently adversarial. Mistakenly assessing intent or accuracy can cause a responder to lose credibility. One overarching benefit of a framework like ours is that journalists, authorities, and researchers can get a handle on ever-shifting flows of ambiguous information without risking a reputation-damaging mistake.
Emma S. Spiro is an associate professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. As a sociologist, her work focuses on understanding social and information-related behaviors in the context of crisis events, including rumors, misinformation, and collective sensemaking in online environments. Kate Starbird is an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Trained in the field of crisis informatics, she now works to understand online rumors, disinformation, and strategic manipulation during crises and other breaking news events.
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