Abstracts Sociology

Misinformation, Leading Tasks, and Echo Chambers within theNevertrump and #Neverhillary Movements

by Shawn Gaulden

This two-article dissertation focuses on echo chambers, misinformation, and leadership in online social movements. Over the last decade, these topics have garnered much research and media attention. Concern for how misinformation and social bots may influence political action, such as voting behavior, and for how insulated spaces can amplify these effects have resulted in a wealth of research examining the issue, yet little research has explored its connection to collective action. Echo chambers are effectively black boxes, and we know little about how they impact collective action and the roles that actors within them play. In this study, I examine the characteristics of social media accounts spreading misinformation and engaging in social movement leadership tasks, whether these actions are happening within echo chambers imbedded in online social movement networks, the quality of information within those spaces, and the implications for collective action by analyzing digital leadership. I use Twitter data collected from the months leading up to, and including, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and analyze the network structure of two movement networks,nevertrump and #neverhillary (Chapter 2), and content analyze tweets for the presence of misinformation and leading tasks (Chapter 3). I assess whether there are echo chambers present in the movement networks and the characteristics of the network accounts. I argue that accounts centrally located in the networks will produce more misinformation, perform more leading tasks, and are more likely to be a social bot than average accounts within the movement networks. I find evidence of echo chambers and the presence of social bots across both movement networks. Results show that centrally located accounts and human users across both movement networks are associated with the spread of misinformation and the performance of leadership tasks. There is also a sizable portion of social bots among the network population, and they are more centrally concentrated within the networks. These findings extend the literature on echo chambers, misinformation, and social movement leadership by examining the characteristics of network accounts producing false claims and social movement leadership tasks. A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. April 19, 2022. Echo chambers, Leadership, Misinformation, Online social movements, Social media, Social networks Deana Rohlinger, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jennifer Proffitt, University Representative; Koji Ueno, Committee Member; Paromita Sanyal, Committee Member.