Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing
Open accessAbstract
The Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter. As information spread, it was filled with rumors (unsubstantiated information), and many of these rumors contained misinformation. Earlier studies have suggested that crowdsourced information flows can correct misinformation, and our research investigates this proposition. This exploratory research examines three rumors, later demonstrated to be false, that circulated on Twitter in the aftermath of the bombings. Our findings suggest that corrections to the misinformation emerge but are muted compared with the propagation of the misinformation. The similarities and differences we observe in the patterns of the misinformation and corrections contained within the stream over the days that followed the attacks suggest directions for possible research strategies to automatically detect misinformation.
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Starbird et al. (2014) found that Twitter users poorly distinguished truth from hoaxes in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, with ratios of 44:1, 18:1, and 5:1 favouring tweets supporting false rumours.
“In contrast, in their study of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Starbird et al. (2014) found that Twitter users did not do so well in distinguishing between the truth and hoaxes.Examining three different rumours, they found the equivalent ratio to be 44:1, 18:1, and 5:1 in favour of tweets supporting false rumours.”
From Detection and Resolution of Rumours in Social Media (2019) · cites this paper as Starbird et al. 2014
Cites
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“In contrast, in their study of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Starbird et al. [Starbird et al. 2014] found that Twitter users did not do so well in distinguishing between the truth and hoaxes.”
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- Authors
- Starbird, K., Maddock, J., Orand, M., Achterman, P., & Mason, R. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Venue
- iConference 2014 Proceedings
- Publisher
- iSchools
- Published
- 2014-03-01
- OpenAlex
- W31250479
- Cited by
- 423
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 63 · 2020: 76 · 2019: 44 · 2018: 52 · 2017: 42 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 23 · 2014: 13
- FWCI
- 106.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- iConference (publishedVersion)
- Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1243170, 1342252)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
- Keywords
- Boston Marathon bombing, misinformation, rumors, Twitter, crowdsourced data, misinformation detection
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