Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes religious misinformation on Arabic social media by characterizing users who circulate or debunk fabricated Hadith, revealing distinct behavioral and interest patterns through quantitative methods and logistic regression.

Contribution

It provides a novel quantitative analysis of religious misinformation spreaders and debunkers on Arabic social media, highlighting their differing characteristics and interests.

Findings

Circulators often follow Sunni and Shia religious accounts from Gulf countries.

Debunkers tend to follow academic Islamic scholars and have broader non-religious interests.

Logistic regression effectively predicts user behavior based on social media features.

Abstract

Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research about religious misinformation which has only been addressed through qualitative approaches. In this work, we study the spread of fabricated quotes (Hadith) that are claimed to belong to Prophet Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) as a case study demonstrating one of the most common religious misinformation forms on Arabic social media. We attempt through quantitative methods to understand the characteristics of social media users who interact with fabricated Hadith. We spotted users who frequently circulate fabricated Hadith and others who frequently debunk it to understand the main differences between the two groups. We used Logistic Regression to automatically predict their behaviors and analyzed its weights to gain insights about the characteristics and interests of each group. We find that both fabricated Hadith circulators and debunkers have generally a lot of ties to religious accounts. However, circulators are identified by many accounts that follow the Shia branch of Islam, Sunni Islamic public figures from the gulf countries, and many Sunni non-professional pages posting Islamic content. On the other hand, debunkers are identified by following academic Islamic scholars from multiple countries and by having more intellectual non-religious interests like charity, politics, and activism.