Understanding the intent behind sharing misinformation on social media

ABSTRACT

Several studies have been conducted in annotating and collecting the misinformation spread on various social media sites. The misinformation spread during COVID-19 pandemic increased many folds. Understanding the reasons and intent of the misinformation during COVID-19 is a crucial task. Existing approaches have not focused on understanding the intent behind sharing misinformation in the first place. To understand the intent, we introduce a new dataset MisMemoir that apart from annotating misinformation, also collects the social context and site history of the user sharing misinformation. Utilising the established benefits of game theory in social media behaviour analysis, we deploy two-person cooperative games to understand how prominent positive feedback cues like likes and retweets are in motivating an individual to share misinformation on the platform Twitter. Experimental results demonstrate that the spread of misinformation’s primary intent is the intentional/unintentional manoeuvre to increased reach and possibly a false sense of accomplishment. Empirically, we show that in a competitive environment like social media, feedback cues like retweets and comments assume the role of ‘attention’ payoff that significantly affects the strategy of a user on Twitter to share misinformation intentionally.