• Korean System Dynamics Review
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.5-35
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• 2013

The study examines the play theory based internet rumor process by using simulating tools, Vensim, which offer a new theoretical basis from which to explore complex adaptive social system. Internet rumor is not a simple linear diffusion process, but a complex interaction behavior between the actors of production and diffusion. Rumor actors consist of two type of diffusion, which is rumor mongers and playful mongers. These two type of mongers make the internet rumor as collective system. Playful mongers play strategically to maximize playfulness. Internet rumor as play is consequence of collective framing constituted by dynamic interaction and playfulness. The networking space spreading internet rumor function as a playground which mobilize play rule, ignoring fact based framing. Rumor as paly, even though it turns out to be a false and loses the public attentions rumor sustains the game play function which makes the rumor without natural extinction. The study proves that playful mongers is a main actors in rumor play ground.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.45-52
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• 2020

Online rumor creates psychological stress and image loss for victims. Prior studies related to online rumor did not consider the online environmental factor, despite the fact that online rumor occurs in the online space. Therefore, this study tried to investigate the influence of online characteristics on online rumor. This study considered perceived anonymity, lack of social presence, and perceived dissemination as online characteristics. We established and demonstrated a research model in which online characteristics affect online rumor behavior through attitude toward online rumor. This study obtained the sample of 201 social network users based on the survey and verified the research model using PLS tool. The results provided that perceived anonymity and perceived dissemination influenced online rumor behavior through attitude toward online rumor. On the other hand, lack of social presence was not significant. The findings of this study provide the fact that an individual's online rumor behavior can be caused by online characteristics. This study suggests that we pay attention to the role of perceived anonymity and perceived dissemination for online rumor behavior.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.363-370
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• 2010

This paper provides a review of the research on the relationship between consumer rumor and marketing management in general, and rumor's effects on brand in particular. Also corporations' efforts for managing negative rumor were discussed. In the subsequential article, this study analyzes the consumer's perception of the origin of rumors through contents analysis method, and performs ANOVA study in addition to identify if brand assets such as brand loyalty and brand involvement can affect rumor credibility perception significantly. Based on these results, this study considers some implications for brand crisis management and communications. According to the results, a brand rumor can affect both the corresponding brands and competitor's brands at a time and the relationships between existing favorable brand attitude of consumer and rumor credibility are not significant enough.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.3868-3888
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• 2022

A widely used social networking service like Twitter has the ability to disseminate information to large groups of people even during a pandemic. At the same time, it is a convenient medium to share irrelevant and unverified information online and poses a potential threat to society. In this research, conventional machine learning algorithms are analyzed to classify the data as either non-rumor data or rumor data. Machine learning techniques have limited tuning capability and make decisions based on their learning. To tackle this problem the authors propose a deep learning-based Rumor Detection Neural Network model to predict the rumor tweet in real-world events. This model comprises three layers, AttCNN layer is used to extract local and position invariant features from the data, AttBi-LSTM layer to extract important semantic or contextual information and HPOOL to combine the down sampling patches of the input feature maps from the average and maximum pooling layers. A dataset from Kaggle and ground dataset #gaja are used to train the proposed Rumor Detection Neural Network to determine the veracity of the rumor. The experimental results of the RDNN Classifier demonstrate an accuracy of 93.24% and 95.41% in identifying rumor tweets in real-time events.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1422-1437
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• 2019

With the rapid development of the Internet and the Mobile Internet, social communication based on the network has become a life style for many people. WeChat is an online social platform, for about one billion users, therefore, it is meaningful to study the spreading and evolution mechanism of the rumor on the WeChat social circle. The Rumor was injected into the WeChat social circle by certain individuals, and the communication and the evolution occur among the nodes within the circle; after the refuting-rumor-information injected into the circle, subsequently,the density of four types of nodes, including the Susceptible, the Latent, the Infective, and the Recovery changes, which results in evolving the WeChat social circle system. In the study, the evolution characteristics of the four node types are analyzed, through construction of the evolution equation. The evolution process of the rumor injection and the refuting-rumor-information injection is simulated through the structure of the virtual social network, and the evolution laws of the four states are depicted by figures. The significant results from this study suggest that the spreading and evolving of the rumors are closely related to the nodes degree on the WeChat social circle.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.3211-3229
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• 2022

To solve the problems existing in the process of Weibo disaster rumor recognition, such as lack of corpus, poor text standardization, difficult to learn semantic information, and simple semantic features of disaster rumor text, this paper takes Sina Weibo as the data source, constructs a dataset for Weibo disaster rumor recognition, and proposes a deep learning model BERT_AT_Stacked LSTM for Weibo disaster rumor recognition. First, add adversarial disturbance to the embedding vector of each word to generate adversarial samples to enhance the features of rumor text, and carry out adversarial training to solve the problem that the text features of disaster rumors are relatively single. Second, the BERT part obtains the word-level semantic information of each Weibo text and generates a hidden vector containing sentence-level feature information. Finally, the hidden complex semantic information of poorly-regulated Weibo texts is learned using a Stacked Long Short-Term Memory (Stacked LSTM) structure. The experimental results show that, compared with other comparative models, the model in this paper has more advantages in recognizing disaster rumors on Weibo, with an F1_Socre of 97.48%, and has been tested on an open general domain dataset, with an F1_Score of 94.59%, indicating that the model has better generalization.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.7
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• pp.680-685
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• 2017

The emergence of online media and their data has enabled data-driven methods to solve challenging and complex tasks such as rumor classification problems. Recently, deep learning based models have been shown as one of the fastest and the most accurate algorithms to solve such problems. These new models, however, either rely on complete data or several days-worth of data, limiting their applicability in real time. In this study, we go beyond this limit and test the possibility of super early rumor detection via recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our model takes in social media streams as time series input, along with basic meta-information about the rumongers including the follower count and the psycholinguistic traits of rumor content itself. Based on analyzing millions of social media posts on 498 real rumors and 494 non-rumor events, our RNN-based model detected rumors with only 30 initial posts (i.e., within a few hours of rumor circulation) with remarkable F1 score of 0.74. This finding widens the scope of new possibilities for building a fast and efficient rumor detection system.

• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-12
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• 2022

A good story persuades people to act. The mobilizing power of a story, however, does not necessarily rely on informational fidelity. During political unrests, word-of-mouth can intermix facts with unverified claims and emotional outrage, often transforming reality into convincing rumor stories. This rapid communication article discusses how rumor publics (dis)approve and participate in 2019 Hong Kong Protests. This survey study finds that police injustice and brutality were the predominant themes of the collected rumor stories, although some stories contained mixed views or anti-protest claims. Rumors of police injustice and brutality were associated with less negative attitudes toward the protests, especially when respondents believed the story. The relationship between rumor stories and protest participation was less obvious, except for rumors about an individual protester's whereabout. This study discusses the ways in which rumor is embedded in contentious political processes.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.853-864
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• 2019

Microblogging services (such as Twitter) are the representative information communication networks during the Web 2.0 era, which have gained remarkable popularity. Weibo has become a popular platform for information dissemination in online social networks due to its large number of users. In this study, a microblog information dissemination model is presented. Related concepts are introduced and analyzed based on the dynamic model of infectious disease, and new influencing factors are proposed to improve the susceptible-infective-removal (SIR) information dissemination model. Correlation analysis is conducted on the existing information dissemination risk and the rumor dissemination model of microblog. In this study, web hyper is used to model rumor dissemination. Finally, the experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the method in reducing the rumor dissemination of microblogs.