User's Action and Decision Making of Retweet Messages towards Reducing Misinformation Spread during Disaster

Abstract

The online social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been used extensively during disaster and emergency situation. Despite the advantages offered by these services on supplying information in vague situation by citizen, we raised the issue of spreading misinformation on Twitter by using retweets. Accordingly, in this study, we conduct a user survey (n=133) to investigate what is the user's action towards spread message in Twitter, and why user decide to perform retweet on the spread message. As the result of the factor analyses, we extracted 3 factors on user's action towards spread message which are: 1) Desire to spread the retweet messages as it is considered important, 2) Mark the retweet messages as favorite using Twitter “Favorite” function, and 3) Search for further information about the content of the retweet messages. Then, we further analyze why user decides to perform retweet. The results reveal that user has desire to spread the message which they think is important and the reason why they retweet it is because of the need to retweet, interesting tweet content and the tweet user. The results presented in this paper provide an understanding on user behavior of information diffusion, with the aim to reduce the spread of misinformation using Twitter during emergency situation.