Effects of Information Veracity and Message Frames on Information Dissemination: A Case Study of 2016 Zika Epidemic Discussion on Twitter

By taking the 2016 Zika outbreak as a case study, this research examines how information veracity (true information vs. misinformation) interacted with message frames to influence the dissemination of information about Zika through retweet networks. The four message frames examined in this study included legislation of funding, election, women's human rights, and sports. In general, we discovered that misinformation about Zika did not outperform true information about Zika in terms of generating more retweets or attracting more users. However, on average, the retweet networks of misinformation about Zika had larger network diameter and higher structural virality than those of true information about Zika. Except for the sports frame, using any of the other three frames engaged more users in retweeting information about Zika than not using any frame, regardless of information accuracy. We also found that the four frames varied in their respective capacities of moderating the impact of information veracity on the dissemination of tweets about Zika. Implications of these findings are discussed in this paper.