Kate Starbird (University of Washington)

Unpacking the Self-Correcting Crowd

For the past three years, my colleague Emma Spiro and I (along with a large team of students) have been exploring how rumors spread online during disaster events. One original goal of that research was to develop automated methods of detecting false rumors, and our hypothesis was that we could use the activities of the online crowd-specifically how the crowd challenges false information as a sensor for false rumors. Our work intended to understand and operationalize the work of the “self-correcting crowd”. In this talk, I’ll briefly discuss some of the most interesting findings of this work in terms of understanding the diffusion of online rumors and the efficacy of using corrections to identify rumors. Then I’ll delve into our most recent study, which examines how and why people correct false rumors and demonstrates how users’ perceived audiences as well as their understandings of how those audiences interact with the information the share-affect whether and how they choose to correct false rumors.