ArticleScientific reports2021
Emotions explain differences in the diffusion of true vs. false social media rumors.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Community-based fact-checking reduces the spread of misleading posts on X (formerly Twitter).Nature communications · 2026Article
- Group cognitive space of online rumors in public health emergencies: a theoretical and empirical study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Social feedback amplifies emotional language in online video live chats.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The Impact of Blame Attribution on Moral Contagion in Controversial Events.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- References to unbiased sources increase the helpfulness of community fact-checks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Elicited emotion: effects of inoculation of an art style on emotionally strong images.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Online propagation of emotions: A study of resharing dynamics on social media following celebrity suicides.PloS one · 2025Article
- Rumor detection model with weighted GraphSAGE focusing on node location.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Expressions of uncertainty in online science communication hinder information diffusion.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Online rumors during the COVID-19 pandemic: co-evolution of themes and emotions.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- A Dynamic Monitoring Method of Public Opinion Risk of Overseas Direct Investment-Based on Multifractal Situation Optimization.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Negativity drives online news consumption.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
False rumors (often termed "fake news") on social media pose a significant threat to modern societies. However, potential reasons for the widespread diffusion of false rumors have been underexplored. In this work, we analyze whether sentiment words, as well as different emotional words, in social media content explain differences in the spread of true vs. false rumors. For this purpose, we collected [Formula: see text] rumor cascades from Twitter, comprising more than 4.5 million retweets that have been fact-checked for veracity. We then categorized the language in social media content to (1) sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative) and (2) eight basic emotions (i. e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, trust, sadness, and surprise). We find that sentiment and basic emotions explain differences in the structural properties of true vs. false rumor cascades. False rumors (as compared to true rumors) are more likely to go viral if they convey a higher proportion of terms associated with a positive sentiment. Further, false rumors are viral when embedding emotional words classified as trust, anticipation, or anger. All else being equal, false rumors conveying one standard deviation more positive sentiment have a 37.58% longer lifetime and reach 61.44% more users. Our findings offer insights into how true vs. false rumors spread and highlight the importance of managing emotions in social media content.
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Registered trials
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