Misinformation on Social Media: An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Analysis of Users' Engagement with Religious Misinformation

• Author / Creator

  Zaman, Md Sayeed Al

• Bangladesh, the world’s fourth-largest Muslim country, has a growing community of social media users. With the increasing social media usage, misinformation emerging from social media also becomes widespread in the country. In particular, religious misinformation has become more commonplace, inspiring violence against minorities and threatening interreligious harmony. Unfortunately, a lack of research prevents understanding Bangladesh’s multifaceted online religious misinformation problem. This research endeavors to fill this gap. Following an exploratory sequential mixed methods analysis combining a qualitative thematic analysis and a quantitative content analysis, this study analyzed Bangladeshi users’ Facebook data to answer two related research questions: (RQ1) How do social media users engage with religious misinformation? (RQ2) What are the frequencies of users’ different types of engagement? The qualitative analysis found three types of engagement: their topics of discourse, reactions to misinformation, and misinformation appraisal. Users’ discourse revolves around religious, radical, and political issues. Their expressions can be explained as positive and negative. The analysis also suggested that users appraise misinformation in four ways: trusting misinformation, denying misinformation, doubting misinformation, and no appraisal. The quantitative analysis of the second part of this study extended the qualitative findings, providing relevant statistical insights. It shows that radical issues (60.4%) dominate users’ discourse, followed by political issues (37.1%). In most cases, users’ reactions are negative (94.1%), exhibiting different destructive behaviors. Alarmingly, the negative reactions are more than seventeen times the positive reactions (5.5%). Results for misinformation appraisal suggest that 69.3% of users believe misinformation, and less than half of the believers (25.9%) can identify and deny misinformation. Users who both talk radical, react negatively, and trust misinformation comprise nearly half (48.21%) of the total users. Theoretical concepts, such as online vigilantism, destructive behavior, misinformation evaluation sets, and political Islam, help explain users’ various engagements with religious misinformation. I end with a discussion of some limitations and recommendations.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • misinformation
  • religion
  • social media
  • religious misinformation
  • mixed methods analysis
  • Bangladesh

• Graduation date

  Spring 2023

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-e8py-d259

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.