Title
Social Determinants of Content Selection in the Age of (Mis)Information.
Abstract
Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called collective intelligence, conspiracy theories - e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism - find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. Users preferentially consume information according to their system of beliefs and the strife within users of opposite worldviews (e.g., scientific and conspiracist) may result in heated debates. In this work we provide a genuine example of information consumption on a set of 1.2 million of Facebook Italian users. We show by means of a thorough quantitative analysis that information supporting different worldviews - i.e. scientific and conspiracist news - are consumed in a comparable way. Moreover, we measure the effect of 4709 evidently false information (satirical version of conspiracist stories) and 4502 debunking memes (information aiming at contrasting unsubstantiated rumors) on polarized users of conspiracy claims.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2014
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
misinformation,collective narratives,crowd dynamics,information spreading
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
8851
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.78
13
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alessandro Bessi1906.02
Guido Caldarelli238240.76
Michela Del Vicario313112.26
Antonio Scala4886.22
Walter Quattrociocchi558242.16