Depth, breadth and structural virality: the influence of emotion, topic, authority and richness on misinformation spread

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the mechanism of the misinformation spread based on the elaboration likelihood model and the effects of four factors – emotion, topic, authority and richness – on the depth, breadth and structural virality of misinformation spread.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected 2,514 misinformation microblogs and 142,006 reposts from Weibo, used deep learning methods to identify the emotions and topics of misinformation and extracted the structural characteristics of the spreading network using the network analysis method.FindingsResults show that misinformation has a smaller spread size and breadth than true news but has a similar spread depth and structural virality. The differential influence of emotions on the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation was found: sadness can promote the breadth of misinformation spread, anger can promote depth and disgust can promote depth and structural virality. In addition, the international topic, the number of followers, images and videos can significantly and positively influence the misinformation's spread size, depth, breadth and structural virality.Originality/valueThe influencing factors of the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation are clarified, which is helpful for the detection and management of misinformation.