Emotions in online rumor diffusion

Emotions are regarded as a dominant driver of human behavior, and yet their role in online rumor diffusion is largely unexplored. In this study, we empirically study the extent to which emotions explain the diffusion of online rumors. We analyze a large-scale sample of 107,014 online rumors from Twitter, as well as their cascades. For each rumor, the embedded emotions were measured based on eight so-called basic emotions from Plutchik’s wheel of...