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Starbird, K. (2017, May). Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem Through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter. In ICWSM (pp. 230-239).
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Samory, M., & Mitra, T. (2018). Conspiracies Online: User discussions in a Conspiracy Community Following Dramatic Events.
Summary:
Authors in both papers explore the alternative narratives of events such as mass shootings, bombings or other crisis events and the users who engage with them by either creating or propagating such news in the name of challenging the ‘corporate controlled media’ by presenting what they think are the actual ‘facts’.
Reflection:
Humans have this tendency of seeking surprises, and from my understanding it arises from the boredom experienced by ‘regular’ and ‘mainstream’ news one consumes all the time. Believing in, or at least giving a thought to conspiracy theory also gives a sense of being a responsible citizen who takes all news sources into account before settling on believing in one, unlike a regular news reader who readily believes in mainstream media”.
Some thoughts or future research directions that came to my mind (considerable fact: I’m not an active Reddit user) after reading Samory et al’s paper as as follows:
- What insights could be gained by taking into consideration the number of users who leave the subreddit? What forces/urges them to do so? Do they grow sick of hearing the ‘alternate’ versions of theories? Do some of them ‘joiners’ only join shortly for gaining alternate version of a particular event and then leave? Maybe studying these figures can produce some more insight into what goes on around these communities, and how they shape over time.
- What’s the ratio of real users vs bots and sock puppets in this subreddit? Do bots and sock puppets exist so as to promote a sense of diversity into spreading alternate narratives of the events?
- What other dissimilar subreddits have they joined and how do they relate to each other. Qualitative analysis of such data by making a graph like that in Starbird’s paper may produce valuable insight.
- Also, since veterans have been in the game for long, and may identify fellow veterans (or even some converts), do they join the subreddits joined by their favourite fellow veterans/converts maybe purely out of interest or friendship?
Also since I have great interest in human psychology and what forms the opinions of people, and how one thought leads to another, the first paper had me thinking about the following couple of things:
- This is an excellent piece of work, but what about users who create their own conspiracy theories? In case of twitter, do such users post the theories they come up with on their own blogs?
- How does gender play out in this whole conspiracy theory thing?
- Do some or any of the conspiracy theory ever turn out to be true?
- What is such user’s regular source of news consumption and how do they land up at the conspiracy theorist news source? Is there a pattern in linking one such news source to another so as to lead the user into the labyrinth of conspiracy theories?
