Helena Webb
Pete Burnap
Bernd Carsten Stahl
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Abstract
Social media platforms provide an increasingly popular means for individuals to share content online. Whilst this produces undoubted societal benefits, the ability for content to be spontaneously posted and reposted creates an ideal environment for rumour and false/malicious information to spread rapidly. When this occurs it can cause significant harm and can be characterised as a “digital wildfire.” In this article, we demonstrate that the propagation and regulation of digital wildfires form important topics for research and conduct an overview of existing work in this area. We outline the relevance of a range of work from the computational and social sciences, including a series of insights into the propagation of rumour and false/malicious information. We argue that significant research gaps remain—for instance, there is an absence of systematic studies on the effects of digital wildfires and there is a need to combine empirical research with a consideration of how the responsible governance of social media can be determined. We propose an agenda for research that establishes a methodology to explore in full the propagation and regulation of unverified content on social media. This agenda promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that will also inform policy debates.
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Index Terms
- Digital Wildfires: Propagation, Verification, Regulation, and Responsible Innovation
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Reviews
Brad D. Reid
"Digital wildfire" describes the rapid spread of "rumor and false/malicious information." The authors provide an excellent review of research concerning how this occurs and where the gaps are in contemporary research. They subsequently discuss their own research agendas. Digital wildfires is truly an interdisciplinary topic, and both students and researchers in the computational and social sciences will want to read this excellent paper. The authors proceed in a very logical and easy-to-read format with major headings and subtopics. The major headings are "Introduction: Social Media, Unverified Content, and Digital Wildfires"; "The Propagation of Digital Wildfires on Social Media"; "Responses to Digital Wildfires by Individuals and Agencies"; "Ethical Dimensions of Digital Wildfires and Social Media Governance"; "Addressing Gaps in the Responsible Governance of Social Media: A Research Agenda"; and a "Conclusion." The authors provide excellent summaries of past research literature and open questions for future research. The authors state: "it is necessary to build on an empirically grounded methodology for the study and advancement of the responsible governance of social media. This requires an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates relevant contemporary developments in computational science, the social sciences, computer ethics, and RRI [responsible research and innovation]." They briefly outline six of their own research activities. These include the following: "scoping ethical questions in relation to digital wildfires"; "scoping existing governance mechanisms, their limitations, and possibilities for further mechanisms"; "continuing case studies of digital wildfires through the quantitative and qualitative examination of social media data sets"; "a Delphi panel" [stakeholder groups look for areas of consensus]; "ethnographic interviews and observations"; and an "ethical security map" [a practical tool to aid policy decision making]. The paper concludes with an exhaustive list of references. This presentation is worthy of your time. Online Computing Reviews Service
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