Rumors are often shared in the marketplace about products, services, brands or organizations; both in the online as well as in the offline scenarios. These rumors get communicated from consumer to consumer in the form of Word of Mouth (WOM). An exhaustive review of literature identified four motivations for consumers to share rumors in the marketplace; which included anxiety management motivati...

It is well-established that within crisis-related communications, rumors are likely to emerge. False rumors, i.e. misinformation, can be detrimental to crisis communication and response; it is therefore important not only to be able to identify messages that propagate rumors, but also corrections or denials of rumor content. In this work, we explore the task of automatically classifying rumor s...

Since most rumors are harmful, how to control the spread of such rumors is important. In this paper, we studied the process of "immunization" against rumors by modeling the process of rumor spreading and changing the termination mechanism for the spread of rumors to make the model more realistic. We derived mean-field equations to describe the dynamics of the rumor spread. By carrying out stead...

Despite the widely reported link between early pubertal timing and internalizing symptoms among girls, less is known about the peer reputation of earlier maturing girls. The current study assesses whether early maturation is associated with perceived popularity and/or rumors, and whether these reputational factors help account for earlier maturing girls' vulnerability to emotional distress. Dra...

The explosive use of social media, in information dissemination and communication, has also made it a popular platform for the spread of rumors. Rumors could be easily propagated and received by a large number of users in social media, resulting in catastrophic effects in the physical world in a very short period. It is a challenging task, if not impossible, to apply classical supervised learni...

Online social networks enable fast and wide diffusion of rumors, which could be potential threats to the society. Understanding the rumor spreading mechanism is therefore essential. This demo presents an agent-patternbased model that can explain the spiky temporal diffusion pattern of rumors. The demo platform provides an interface allowing users to check a wide set of parameters contribute to ...

Two studies examine the effects of reporting rumors of sexual assaults on a college campus. Participants read headlines and short articles about an unfamiliar college. Key headlines and articles reported an increase in sexual assaults as a fact, a rumor, a denied rumor, or a proven falsehood. Participants then rated perceptions of the college, including opinions on the level of crime and safety...