TY - JOUR AU - Shin, Jieun AU - Jian, Lian AU - Driscoll, Kevin AU - Bar, François PY - 2015/10/31 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - POLITICAL RUMORING ON TWITTER DURING THE 2012 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY JF - AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research JA - SPIR VL - 5 IS - 0 SE - Papers S DO - UR - https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8793 SP - AB - As much as Twitter played a major role in political discourse during the 2012 US presidential election, it also served as a conduit for unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation. Based on large-scale content analyzed Twitter messages (n=330,538), our exploratory analyses reveal that rumors about presidential candidates were mainly spread through a retweet button, yet hardly contested and corrected in a interactive process. Twitter showed a strong partisan structure for active rumor spreaders. However, rumor debunkers neither formed a cohesive community, nor exhibited a partisan structure. We found mixed results for the effects of rumor debunking effort. Professional rumor debunking sites (e.g., Factcheck.org) were relatively effective in curbing spread of satire-based rumors, but did not show significant influence on other types of rumors. Implications for the affordances of Twitter and effective rumor debunking strategies are discussed. ER -