Persuasion Strategies in Misinformation-containing Weibo Posts

Chen, Sijing; Xiao, Lu; Mao, Jin

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109704 Copy

Description

Title

Persuasion Strategies in Misinformation-containing Weibo Posts

Author(s)

• Chen, Sijing
• Xiao, Lu
• Mao, Jin

Issue Date

2021-03-17

Keyword(s)

• Persuasion Strategy
• Misinformation
• Social Media

Abstract

Social media users were found to be persuaded by misinformation and contribute to the propagation of misinformation. It is important and urgent to understand the mechanisms behind the presentation of misinformation-containing posts in social media. While previous research on online misinformation has focused on the non-content and surface-linguistic features, our study aims to explore sociological and psychological features from the perspective of persuasion strategies. Through content analysis based on the Aristotle's Rhetoric Theory, we found that the pathos is the most common act of persuasion in misinformation-containing posts. Furthermore, there are statistically significant relationships between the existence of some persuasion strategies and the retransmission of misinformation-containing posts. These findings enhance our understanding of the mechanisms behind misinformation-containing posts and shed lights on the development of computational misinformation detection and misinformation combating efforts.

Publisher

iSchools

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109704

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 is held by Sijing Chen, Lu Xiao, and Jin Mao. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

Owning Collections