For Publishers
DiscoveryMetadataPeer reviewHostingPublishing
For Researchers
JoinPublishReviewCollect
Register
Blog
About
Search
Advanced search
My ScienceOpen
Search
For Publishers
For Researchers
Blog
About
9
views
9
references
 Top references
cited by
0
    
0 reviews
 Review
0
comments
 Comment
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      211
      similar
       All similar
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Polarization and Fake News: Early Warning of Potential Misinformation Targets

      Preprint
      Author(s): , , ,
      Publication date Created:

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenArXiv
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Users polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, "predicting" future fake news topics. We validate the performances of the proposed methodology on a massive Italian Facebook dataset, showing that we are able to identify topics that are susceptible to misinformation with 77% accuracy. Moreover, such information may be embedded as a new feature in an additional classifier able to recognize fake news with 91% accuracy. The novelty of our approach consists in taking into account a series of characteristics related to users behavior on online social media, making a first, important step towards the smoothing of polarization and the mitigation of misinformation phenomena.

          Related collections

          Most cited references9

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Structural diversity in social contagion.

          Johan Ugander, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow … (2012)
          The concept of contagion has steadily expanded from its original grounding in epidemic disease to describe a vast array of processes that spread across networks, notably social phenomena such as fads, political opinions, the adoption of new technologies, and financial decisions. Traditional models of social contagion have been based on physical analogies with biological contagion, in which the probability that an individual is affected by the contagion grows monotonically with the size of his or her "contact neighborhood"--the number of affected individuals with whom he or she is in contact. Whereas this contact neighborhood hypothesis has formed the underpinning of essentially all current models, it has been challenging to evaluate it due to the difficulty in obtaining detailed data on individual network neighborhoods during the course of a large-scale contagion process. Here we study this question by analyzing the growth of Facebook, a rare example of a social process with genuinely global adoption. We find that the probability of contagion is tightly controlled by the number of connected components in an individual's contact neighborhood, rather than by the actual size of the neighborhood. Surprisingly, once this "structural diversity" is controlled for, the size of the contact neighborhood is in fact generally a negative predictor of contagion. More broadly, our analysis shows how data at the size and resolution of the Facebook network make possible the identification of subtle structural signals that go undetected at smaller scales yet hold pivotal predictive roles for the outcomes of social processes.
          Article 0 comments Cited 169 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: found
            Is Open Access

            Debunking in a world of tribes

            Fabiana Zollo, Alessandro Bessi, Michela Del Vicario … (2017)
            Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, in such a disintermediated environment misinformation is pervasive and attempts to debunk are often undertaken to contrast this trend. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of debunking on Facebook 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 usually consuming proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook US interact with specific debunking posts. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. However, both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. Then, we measure how users from both echo chambers interacted with 50,220 debunking posts accounting for both users consumption patterns and the sentiment expressed in their comments. Sentiment analysis reveals a dominant negativity in the comments to debunking posts. Furthermore, such posts remain mainly confined to the scientific echo chamber. Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.
            Article 0 comments Cited 99 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook

              Walter Quattrociocchi, Ana Schmidt, Michela Del Vicario … (2017)
              Social media heavily changed the way we get informed and shape our opinions. Users’ polarization seems to dominate news consumption on Facebook. Through a massive analysis on 920 news outlets and 376 million users, we explore the anatomy of news consumption on Facebook on a global scale. We show that users tend to confine their attention on a limited set of pages, thus determining a sharp community structure among news outlets. Furthermore, our findings suggest that users have a more cosmopolitan perspective of the information space than news providers. We conclude with a simple model of selective exposure that well reproduces the observed connectivity patterns. The advent of social media and microblogging platforms has radically changed the way we consume information and form opinions. In this paper, we explore the anatomy of the information space on Facebook by characterizing on a global scale the news consumption patterns of 376 million users over a time span of 6 y (January 2010 to December 2015). We find that users tend to focus on a limited set of pages, producing a sharp community structure among news outlets. We also find that the preferences of users and news providers differ. By tracking how Facebook pages “like” each other and examining their geolocation, we find that news providers are more geographically confined than users. We devise a simple model of selective exposure that reproduces the observed connectivity patterns.
              Article 0 comments Cited 80 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
                Bookmark
                All references

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Publication date Created: 05 February 2018
                Article
                ArXiV ID: 1802.01400
                SO-VID: e09b1c71-1680-4957-ad22-2f12d0a2b54a
                License:

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                Categories cs.SI

                Data availability:

                Comments

                Comment on this article