Normative Mechanism of Rumor Dissemination on Twitter.

This study aims to understand the impact of descriptive social norms on message believability and transmission and its underlying mechanism on Twitter. Using two types of information (i.e., news and rumor) presented as a tweet message, the influence of the number of retweets as a normative cue was tested. A result of an online experiment with 639 Twitter users suggests that regardless of the label of the information, message believability and intention to share were stronger for a tweet with a high number of retweets. The mediation test showed that the presumption that a message is believable to others mediates the relationship between a high number of retweets and message believability.