Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media Following Extreme Events

In this study, social media posts are conceptualized as truth signals with varying strengths, either above or below each individual's threshold for believing the post is true. Optimally, thresholds should be contingent on the (incentivized) error pena lties and base‐rate of true posts, both of which were manipulated. Separate receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses indicate that participants performed slightly better than chance for natural disasters and moderately better than chance for terror attacks. While the pooled thresholds are ordinally consistent with the base‐rate and error penalty manipulations, they are underadjusted compared to the optimal thresholds. After accounting for demographic and cognitive variables, the base‐rate manipulation significantly predicted sensitivity, specificity, and true response rates in th e expected direction for both content domains, while the error penalty manipulation had no significant effect in either domain. Self‐identified political conservatives performed worse at classifying false content as false for natural disasters, but better for terror attacks.
Source: Risk Analysis - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Original Research Article Source Type: research