Echo chambers in the age of misinformation

Abstract

The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process generates "collective intelligence", the WWW also allows the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that often elicite rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15 -- where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of the civil war in the US. We study how Facebook users consume information related to two different kinds of narrative: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, the sizes of the spreading cascades differ. Homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents, but each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. To mimic these dynamics, we introduce a data-driven percolation model on signed networks.

References in corpus (2)

• Science vs Conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information
• Computational fact checking from knowledge networks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The role of homophily in the emergence of opinion controversies
• Balancing Information Exposure in Social Networks
• Debunking in a World of Tribes
• Opinion Diversity and Social Bubbles in Adaptive Sznajd Networks
• Information Credibility in the Social Web: Contexts, Approaches, and Open Issues
• CIMTDetect: A Community Infused Matrix-Tensor Coupled Factorization Based Method for Fake News Detection
• Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views