Misinformation Campaigns. Applying Motivated Reasoning and Information Manipulation Theory to Understand the Role and Impact of Social Media in the Digital Transformation

Since the year 2000, the broad media scene has been changing. Today’s newspapers, magazines, online platforms (incl. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), radio, and television compete increasingly for capturing the attention of their respective audience. This is accomplished by often bold, dramatic, innovative, often radical, and nearly always digital (whenever possible) means of social media solutions. All of these developments when examined jointly constitute a mélange of digital social media, already designed with built-in social network properties. In this chapter, we present a theoretical framework that consists of two theories namely (1) the Motivated Reasoning Theorymotivated reasoning theory and (2) the Information Manipulation Theoryinformation manipulation theory . These theories are functioning as respective lenses through which the above-described setting and developments may be viewed and examined. In turn, this theoretical framework allowed us to describe, relate, explain, and predict our observations. We found that social media platforms, especially blogs, provide a fertile ground for irresponsible citizen journalism to flourish. Although citizen journalism is NOT always bad, however more regulations, guidelines, and awareness should be imposed to avoid chaotic situations. Many researchers have studied Twitter, Facebook, and the like but not many have studied the blogosphere due to various reasons pointed out in this book chapter. The rogue side of citizen journalism can include disseminating misinformation, agitation and propaganda, content mocking, biased or offensive contents, etc. In this research, we try to understand rogue citizen journalismrogue citizen journalism from social science perspective using a socio-computational informed methodology. Misinformation on social media is a disruptive phenomenon. It has disrupted how people perceive and use the digital space (Rogers & Shoemaker, 1971). Such disruptions are gradually eroding trust in democratic and scientific institutions and beliefs. Transformative solutions are needed to restore that trust in digital spaces.