The Influences of Misinformation on Incidences of Politically Motivated Violence in Europe
| Author(s) | Rulis, Mina | |
| Date Accessioned | 2024-06-25T16:46:03Z | |
| Date Available | 2024-06-25T16:46:03Z | |
| Publication Date | 2023-05 | |
| Abstract | In the modern era of social media and related forms of electronic media, the issue of misinformation has become increasingly prevalent. To this end, as recent US presidential elections and experiences in Ukraine in the lead-up to the 2022 Russian invasion each suggest, transnational misinformation in particular poses an increasing threat to the security and stability of modern nation states. Furthermore, at least anecdotally, there are claims of a direct relationship between misinformation narratives and domestic acts of politically motivated violence. Yet such claims lack systematic empirical evidence, especially as it relates to the global spread of misinformation by state-based or transnational actors. As these effects of transnational misinformation on domestic political unrest remain understudied, I collect and evaluate empirical evidence of such an association. My research more specifically assesses the effects of transnational misinformation on several distinct forms of domestic political violence within the context of Europe, sharpening our empirical understanding of the purported association between misinformation and political violence. This is achieved through the fusion of a fine grained spatial temporal dataset of confirmed instances of news-based misinformation with daily level event data on incidents of political conflict. These combined data are then modeled and analyzed using univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics and multivariate LASSO regression models of misinformation in Europe for the period covering January 2015 to May 2022. These analyses imply a positive association between misinformation and political violence in Europe for this time period. These findings additionally indicate that this association is much stronger for civilian to government violence events than it is for civilian to civilian violence. Altogether this thesis accordingly provides novel empirical evidence for the pernicious effects of transnational misinformation on political violence. | |
| Advisor | enter | |
| Program | enter | |
| URL | https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/34525 | |
| Language | en_US | |
| Publisher | University of Delaware | |
| Title | The Influences of Misinformation on Incidences of Politically Motivated Violence in Europe | |
| Type | Thesis |