Rumor

[4] Stern experimented on rumor involving a "chain of subjects" who passed a story from "mouth to ear" without the right to repeat or explain it.

So formidably defined, rumor is but a special case of informal social communications, including myth, legend, and current humor.

"[7] It was noted that the rest of the discussion was constructed around these statements, further reinforcing the idea of collective problem solving.

The statements were then coded as being one of the following: prudent, apprehensive, authenticating, interrogatory, providing information, belief, disbelief, sense-making, digressive, or un-codable.

[8] "Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels.

A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."

Almost no work had been done until recently on how different forms of media and particular cultural-historical conditions may facilitate a rumor's diffusion.

[9] The Internet's recent appearance as a new media technology has shown ever new possibilities for the fast diffusion of rumor, as the debunking sites such as snopes.com, urbanlegend.com, and factcheck.org demonstrate.

[9] In the early part of the 21st century, some legal scholars have attended to political uses of rumor, though their conceptualization of it remains social psychological and their solutions to it as public problem are from a legal scholarly perspective, largely having to do with libel and privacy laws and the damage to personal reputations.

Strategic communication is the process of crafting messages in support of specific organizational goals, and is usually concerned with governments, militaries and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

Adroit strategic communication requires an understanding of stories, trends and memes circulating within a culture.

Rumors can be viewed as stories that seem rational but that are steeped into speculation, in connection with a certain narrative landscape (the vast array of cultural expression circulating within a community or region).

[11] In their book, Narrative Landmines: Rumors, Islamist Extremism and the Struggle for Strategic Influence, co-authors Daniel Bernardi, Pauline Hope Cheong, Chris Lundry and Scott W. Ruston coin the term narrative IED to help explain the function and danger of rumors in a strategic communication context.

As Bernardi notes, "Like their explosive cousins, rumors can be created and planted by nearly anybody, require limited resources to utilize, can be deadly for those in its direct path, and can instil fear".