According to a study from the University of Washington, tweets shared from official accounts, such as the one belonging to media, emergency responders, government agencies and companies caught in viral stories, can actually hinder the spread of fake rumours and not verified sources on Twitter, as well as amend the wrong information the reliability of which is easily taken for granted.

The researchers focused on two events that generated pitch of rumours on Twitter. One referred to an event in Sydney, Australia, involving rumoured police raids in a Muslim neighbourhood during a hostage situation. The other referred to the alleged hijacking of a WestJet flight on its way to Mexico. Both the cases were stopped and proved wrong through denials from official accounts.

“A lot of emergency managers are afraid that the voice of the many drowns out the official sources on Twitter, and that even if they are part of the conversation, no one is going to hear them,” explains one of the authors Elodie Fichet, a University of Washington doctoral student in the Department of Communication. “We disproved that and showed that official sources, at least in the cases we looked at, do have a critical impact.”

The study can be seen as a lesson for companies and organisation who may be involved in similar situations, as a guide to prepare them to deal with rumours and handle difficult opinions before the official and complete information is available.

“Oftentimes in a crisis, the person operating a social media account is not the person who makes operational decisions or who even decides what should be said,” said the senior author of the study and the ‘emComp’ lab director Kate Starbird, a University of Washington assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering.

“But that person still needs to be empowered to take action in the moment because if you wait 20 minutes, it may be a very different kind of crisis than if you can stamp out misinformation early on,” she added.

The researchers from the University of Washington examined the cases and noted that the largest portion of tweets, both confirming or denying the two analysed rumours, were retweets of only a small number of Twitter accounts, which showed the potential influence of each individual account on the diffusion of information. Furthermore, it was noted that a large part of the rumours were generated by ‘breaking news’ accounts, which attempt to be the first releasing news but often ignore the official procedures required by official journalists, such as the verification of information’s reliability before its release to the public.

In the first case, the rumour analysed involved the “Sydney Siege” happened in December 2014. In that case, a man armed with a gun took 18 hostages at a café in Australia. The news reported by a radio talk show host claimed that federal police agents were riding homes in the Lakemba neighbourhood, with a majority of Muslims, when the police officers were in that area only for a scheduled tour of a local mosque.
In about 7 hours, 1,279 tweets about the rumour were posted on Twitter. The opinions were contrasting, with 38% affirming the rumour and 57% denying it. The majority of the affirmation spread in the first hour and half, before the police responded with the official version. Mostly of the tweets spread from just five Twitter accounts and were retwitted multiple times.

However, when the Australian Federal Police responded, the situation changed. The AFP shared a single tweet stating: “Reports that the APF is conducting search warrants in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba are incorrect” and the number of tweets shared increased up to one tweet per second. Of the new tweets, 90% were retweets of that single Police shared tweet, and all were denying the rumour. Affirmations of the rumour following the official denial of the AFP were limited and did not resurface in a significant and consistent way.

The second case analysed involved the rumour of a supposed hijacking of a WestJet flight departed from Vancouver, British Columbia, and directed to Mexico, in January 2015. The rumour generated more than 27,000 tweets and started spreading on Twitter after a websites monitoring flights received what they believed represented a ‘hijacked code’ from the plane, which was probably caused by a mistake or issues with the equipment.

It was a Saturday afternoon and therefore there were no WestJet communications employees officially on duty. However, one of the members of the WestJet social media team noticed from its home the rumour about 20 minutes after its original spreading.

In the period between 20 and 30 minutes after the beginning of the rumour, a growing number of pre-mentioned ‘breaking news’ accounts and others with aviation-related interests started tweeting about the rumour. Even though the WestJet employee noticed the situation, the company believed that the rumour was not reliable but was not totally sure. It was due to the fact that the WestJet staff could not access direct information from the plane, as it was in its final descent part and direct communication were not allowed for security reason.

A WestJet employee was interviewed by the research team and clarified the situation: “The biggest question for us was: ‘Do we respond now with almost confirmed information, or do we wait five minutes to get confirmed info? We chose, ‘Let’s get it out now,’ and then five minutes later confirmed.” The two WestJet denial tweets slowed rapidly the rumour spread and in a couple of hours no more related tweets were shared.

After that specific situation, WestJet started expanding its collection of precreated tweet templates approved beforehand and ready to be shared according to the situation and the specific issues. This innovation gives the possibility to social media managers to deal in real time to the issues even when the available information is limited and without requesting approval, responding to specific rumours straight away and tackling problems before they expand and become hard to control.

Professor Starbid expressed her point of view suggesting that in today’s society it is crucial for companies and emergency response agencies to invest in qualified personnel and develop a presence online even before a crisis, as the one of the examples, happens. The examples are useful to understand how the investment can be worth during hard times.

“Being online is really important, even if you don’t want to be,” Starbird explained. “Avoiding social media channels because you don’t want to be confronted with misinformation is a real danger for an organization. You’re essentially opening up a space for information to be spreading without your voice being a part of it.”

Written by: Pietro Paolo Frigenti

Journal Reference: Cynthia Andrews, Elodie Fichet, Yuwei Ding, Emma S. Spiro, and Kate Starbird. 2016. Keeping Up with the Tweet-dashians: The Impact of ‘Official’ Accounts on Online Rumoring. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 452-465. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819986