4,832 research outputs found
Debunking in a World of Tribes
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the
beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around
common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews.
However, the wide availability of user-provided content and the direct path
between producers and consumers of information often foster confusion about
causations, encouraging mistrust, rumors, and even conspiracy thinking. In
order to contrast such a trend attempts to \textit{debunk} are often
undertaken. Here, we examine the effectiveness of debunking through a
quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan
2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users interact with proven
(scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook in
the US. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users
interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. Both groups
interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. We examine
47,780 debunking posts and find that attempts at debunking are largely
ineffective. For one, only a small fraction of usual consumers of
unsubstantiated information interact with the posts. Furthermore, we show that
those few are often the most committed conspiracy users and rather than
internalizing debunking information, they often react to it negatively. Indeed,
after interacting with debunking posts, users retain, or even increase, their
engagement within the conspiracy echo chamber
Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks
Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact
only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate
misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In
this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading
phenomena over political communication networks. Mining 12 million Twitter
messages, we reconstruct a network in which users interchange opinions related
to the impeachment of the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We define
a continuous {political position} parameter, independent of the network's
structure, that allows to quantify the presence of echo chambers in the
strongly connected component of the network, reflected in two well-separated
communities of similar sizes with opposite views of the impeachment process. By
means of simple spreading models, we show that the capability of users in
propagating the content they produce, measured by the associated spreadability,
strongly depends on their attitude. Users expressing pro-impeachment sentiments
are capable to transmit information, on average, to a larger audience than
users expressing anti-impeachment sentiments. Furthermore, the users'
spreadability is correlated to the diversity, in terms of political position,
of the audience reached. Our method can be exploited to identify the presence
of echo chambers and their effects across different contexts and shed light
upon the mechanisms allowing to break echo chambers.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information available as ancillary
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CIMTDetect: A Community Infused Matrix-Tensor Coupled Factorization Based Method for Fake News Detection
Detecting whether a news article is fake or genuine is a crucial task in
today's digital world where it's easy to create and spread a misleading news
article. This is especially true of news stories shared on social media since
they don't undergo any stringent journalistic checking associated with main
stream media. Given the inherent human tendency to share information with their
social connections at a mouse-click, fake news articles masquerading as real
ones, tend to spread widely and virally. The presence of echo chambers (people
sharing same beliefs) in social networks, only adds to this problem of
wide-spread existence of fake news on social media. In this paper, we tackle
the problem of fake news detection from social media by exploiting the very
presence of echo chambers that exist within the social network of users to
obtain an efficient and informative latent representation of the news article.
By modeling the echo-chambers as closely-connected communities within the
social network, we represent a news article as a 3-mode tensor of the structure
- and propose a tensor factorization based method to
encode the news article in a latent embedding space preserving the community
structure. We also propose an extension of the above method, which jointly
models the community and content information of the news article through a
coupled matrix-tensor factorization framework. We empirically demonstrate the
efficacy of our method for the task of Fake News Detection over two real-world
datasets. Further, we validate the generalization of the resulting embeddings
over two other auxiliary tasks, namely: \textbf{1)} News Cohort Analysis and
\textbf{2)} Collaborative News Recommendation. Our proposed method outperforms
appropriate baselines for both the tasks, establishing its generalization.Comment: Presented at ASONAM'1
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We are the Change that we Seek: Information Interactions During a Change of Viewpoint
There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation
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