Abstract
Online misinformation is primarily spread by humans deciding to do so. We therefore seek to understand the factors making this content compelling and, ultimately, driving online sharing. Fuzzy-Trace Theory, a leading account of decision making, posits that humans encode stimuli, such as online content, at multiple levels of representation; namely, gist, or bottom-line meaning, and verbatim, or surface-level details. Both of these levels of representation are expected to contribute independently to online information spread, with the effects of gist dominating. Important aspects of gist in the context of online content include the presence of a clear causal structure, and semantic coherence – both of which aid in meaning extraction. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that causal and semantic coherence are associated with online sharing of misinformative social media content using Coh-Metrix – a widely-used set of psycholinguistic measures. Results support Fuzzy-Trace Theory’s predictions regarding the role of causally- and semantically-coherent content in promoting online sharing and motivate better measures of these key constructs.
Pedram Hosseini
Ph.D. Student
Pedram Hosseini is a PhD student in the department of Computer Science at the George Washington University (GWU). His main areas of interest are Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Pedram’s current research focuses on providing an analytical framework for understanding how individuals make various decisions on social media and more broadly in interconnected networks. Before joining GWU, Pedram spent a year at Sharif University of Technology as a visiting researcher focusing on NLP research. Prior to this, his master’s thesis, completed at Guilan University, led to development of a sentiment analysis platform for Persian. Pedram is extremely passionate about entrepreneurship, start-ups and innovation. He spent summer of 2017 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an intern in Delta v program, leading development of the NLP platform of a FinTech startup (SigmaRatings). Outside work, Pedram plays volleyball and ping pong (member of team A at GWU,) whenever he gets a chance.