Persuasion strategies of misinformation-containing posts in the social media

• Pathos strategies are found to be the most common acts of persuasion in misinformation-containing posts. • Gratitude, reciprocity, and pathos-negative are frequently used together in misinformation-containing posts. • The usage of persuasion strategies are correlated with topic, expected actions, and digital elements of a misinformation-containing post. • Misinformation-containing posts using pathos-other, storytelling and repetition strategy show positive effects on invoking user responses. Social media users were found to be persuaded by misinformation and contribute to the propagation of misinformation. It is important and urgent to understand the mechanisms behind the presentation and diffusion of misinformation-containing posts in social media. However, majority of previous studies on online misinformation focused on the non-content or surface-linguistic features, which omitted the intrinsically sociological and psychological features behind the presentation of online misinformation. Based on persuasion theories, this study characterizes the usage of persuasion strategies and its influence on the propagation of misinformation-containing posts in Sina Weibo, which can help us better understand the sociological and psychological mechanism behind the presentation and diffusion of online misinformation. The findings of this study indicate that the pathos strategies are the most common acts of persuasion in misinformation-containing posts in contrast to regular posts. In addition, the type of persuasion strategies used in the misinformation-containing posts correlate with the topics, expected actions and digital elements of the posts. Furthermore, we found statistically significant effects of persuasion strategieson users’ responses to misinformation-containing posts. The findings of this study imply a complex and context-dependent mechanism behind the misinformation presentation and propagation, which shed lights on the efforts for fighting misinformation in social media.