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 $40K$ 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 $2M$ likes and $190K$ comments, made by approximately $340K$ and $65K$ 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

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

Mapping social dynamics on Facebook: The Brexit debate

Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play a pivotal role in content consumption and information spreading. Users tend to select information adhering (and reinforcing) their worldview and to ignore dissenting information. This pattern elicits the formation of polarized groups – i.e., echo chambers – where the interaction with like-minded people might even reinforce polarization. In this work we address news consumption around Brexit in UK on Facebook. In particular, we perform a massive analysis on more than 1 million users interacting with Brexit related posts from the main news providers between January and July 2016. We show that consumption patterns elicit the emergence of two distinct communities of news outlets. Furthermore, to better characterize inner group dynamics, we introduce a new technique which combines automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis. We compare how the same topics are presented on posts and the related emotional response on comments finding significant differences in both echo chambers and that polarization influences the perception of topics. Our results provide important insights about the determinants of polarization and evolution of core narratives on online debating