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.

Social Informatics - 6th International Conference, SocInfo 2014, Proceedings

Caldarelli, Guido;Quattrociocchi, Walter
2014-01-01

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.
2014
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3694080
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