the role of the rumor

can spread in many contexts, they are particularly prevalent and consequential in

disasters . An important feature of disasters is that it often takes time to confirm the disaster’s causes and consequences. This provides a fertile ground for rumors because individuals do not receive the facts they desire, and so they tend to fill in the blanks, improvise news, and spread the rumors they hear. Due to the speed of message retransmission on social media, the diffusion of rumors, especially false rumors, can be particularly devastating in disaster situations." "In recent years, the widespread use of social media has facilitated the propagation of messages after disasters. Unfortunately, because the veracity of messages is often difficult to determine in a disaster situation, social media also facilitates the rapid diffusion of rumors. Current studies have examined why individuals post or transmit rumors on social media. However, investigating factors affecting the initial rumor transmission is just the first step for rumor control after disasters. After rumors have been transmitted, understanding what accounts for message retransmission in disasters is especially vital. [...] Rumor is typically defined in one of two ways. One can define rumor as “distorted, exaggerated, irrational and inauthentic information,” which is a commonly-held view in practice. However, in academic research, rumor is typically defined as an unverified or unconfirmed message. [...] Here, we adopt the typical academic definition of rumor in which rumor is agnostic as to accuracy. We define rumor as a message that is currently unsubstantiated by a

Richard Dawkins. “The Selfish Gene.” Oxford University Press. 1976.

STEPS OF RUMOR RETRANSMISSION

STEP 3: RETRANSMISSION EXAMPLES

LOGIN TO SOCIAL MEDIA AND READ THE CONTENT IN A RUMOR

FEEL AT LEAST PARTIALLY PERSUADED BY THE RECEIVED RUMOR

RETRANSMIT THE RUMOR BY CLICKING THE "FORWARD" BUTTON

" Even though rumors

message receiver. This can include rumors later verified to be true and rumors later proven to be false." "The key distinction between transmission and retransmission in a social network is novelty: transmission involves posting information that is new to the network. In some cases, a transmitter might generate the information him/herself (e.g., when witnessing a disaster or when making information up) and post it on social media, while in other cases a transmitter might bring the information to the online social network from some other source (e.g., from an external news service). In the second case, the content posted by the message sender is still new to social media, so the senders’ behavior is still considered message transmission on social media. Retransmission, in contrast, involves resending information that is already on the network."

MEMES + GENES

"A new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. [...] I abbreviate mimeme to meme. [...] Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the

gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

[...] If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. [...] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. [...] For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. [...] An 'idea-meme' might be defined as an entity that is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another."