134 research outputs found
News and Misinformation Consumption in Europe: A Longitudinal Cross-Country Perspective
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and
accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they
can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant
societal challenges. To combat misinformation effectively, it is crucial to
understand the online information environment and news consumption patterns.
Most existing research has primarily focused on single topics or individual
countries, lacking cross-country comparisons. This study investigated
information consumption in four European countries, analyzing three years of
Twitter activity from news outlet accounts in France, Germany, Italy, and the
UK and focusing on the role of misinformation sources. Our work offers a
perspective on how topics of European significance are interpreted across
various countries. Results indicate that reliable sources dominate the
information landscape, although unreliable content is still present across all
countries and topics. While most users engage with reliable sources, a small
percentage consume questionable content. Interestingly, few users have a mixed
information diet, bridging the gap between questionable and reliable news in
the similarity network. Cross-country comparisons revealed differences in
audience overlap of news sources, offering valuable guidance for policymakers
and scholars in developing effective and tailored solutions to combat
misinformation
Structural Patterns of the Occupy Movement on Facebook
In this work we study a peculiar example of social organization on Facebook:
the Occupy Movement -- i.e., an international protest movement against social
and economic inequality organized online at a city level. We consider 179 US
Facebook public pages during the time period between September 2011 and
February 2013. The dataset includes 618K active users and 753K posts that
received about 5.2M likes and 1.1M comments. By labeling user according to
their interaction patterns on pages -- e.g., a user is considered to be
polarized if she has at least the 95% of her likes on a specific page -- we
find that activities are not locally coordinated by geographically close pages,
but are driven by pages linked to major US cities that act as hubs within the
various groups. Such a pattern is verified even by extracting the backbone
structure -- i.e., filtering statistically relevant weight heterogeneities --
for both the pages-reshares and the pages-common users networks
Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content Diversity
Facebook is flooded by diverse and heterogeneous content, from kittens up to
music and news, passing through satirical and funny stories. Each piece of that
corpus reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background. In the
Italian Facebook we have found an interesting case: a page having more than
followers that every day posts the same picture of a popular Italian
singer. In this work, we use such a page as a control to study and model the
relationship between content heterogeneity on popularity. In particular, we use
that page for a comparative analysis of information consumption patterns with
respect to pages posting science and conspiracy news. In total, we analyze
about likes and comments, made by approximately and
users, respectively. We conclude the paper by introducing a model mimicking
users selection preferences accounting for the heterogeneity of contents
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
Affective and interactional polarization align across countries
Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a
democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and
one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the
phenomena. Here we investigate how affective and interactional polarization are
related across nine countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain,
Turkey, UK, USA). First, we show that political interaction networks are
polarized on Twitter. Second, we reveal that out-group interactions, defined by
the network, are more toxic than in-group interactions, meaning that affective
and interactional polarization are aligned. Third, we show that out-group
interactions receive lower engagement than in-group interactions. Finally, we
show that the political right reference lower reliability media than the
political left, and that interactions between politically engaged accounts are
limited and rarely reciprocated. These results hold across countries and
represent a first step towards a more unified understanding of polarization.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 68 reference
Public discourse and news consumption on online social media: A quantitative, cross-platform analysis of the Italian Referendum
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence showed that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims while dissenting information is mainly ignored or might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives on online social media. In this paper we address such a challenge by focusing on the discussion around the Italian Constitutional Referendum by conducting a quantitative, cross-platform analysis on both Facebook public pages and Twitter accounts. We observe the spontaneous emergence of well-separated communities on both platforms. Such a segregation is completely spontaneous, since no categorization of contents was performed a priori. By exploring the dynamics behind the discussion, we find that users tend to restrict their attention to a specific set of Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. Finally, taking advantage of automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis techniques, we are able to identify the most controversial topics inside and across both platforms. We measure the distance between how a certain topic is presented in the posts/tweets and the related emotional response of users. Our results provide interesting insights for the understanding of the evolution of the core narratives behind different echo chambers and for the early detection of massive viral phenomena around false claims
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