Homophily and polarization in the age of misinformation
Homophily and polarization in the age of misinformation
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DOI：
10.1140/epjst/e2015-50319-0
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发表时间：
2016-10-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Quattrociocchi, Walter
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bessi, Alessandro;Petroni, Fabio;Quattrociocchi, Walter
世界经济论坛将大量的数字错误信息列为我们社会的主要威胁之一。未经证实的谣言的传播可能会对公众舆论造成严重后果，例如关于埃博拉病毒的谣言对卫生保健工作者造成干扰。在这项工作中，我们以Facebook为目标，描述了120万意大利用户关于已验证(科学新闻)和未验证(阴谋性新闻)内容的信息消费模式。通过全面的量化分析，我们提供了关于系统解剖的重要见解，错误信息可能会通过该系统传播。特别是，我们发现，用户对已验证(或未验证)内容的参与度与具有相似消费模式(同形)的朋友数量相关。最后，我们测量了这个社会系统对4709条错误信息的反应。我们发现，对特定类型的内容(极化)的频繁(和选择性)暴露是检测某些类型的谣言更有可能传播的同性者集群的良好指标。
The World Economic Forum listed massive digital misinformation as one of the main threats for our society. The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors may have serious consequences on public opinion such as in the case of rumors about Ebola causing disruption to health-care workers. In this work we target Facebook to characterize information consumption patterns of 1.2M Italian users with respect to verified (science news) and unverified (conspiracy news) contents. Through a thorough quantitative analysis we provide important insights about the anatomy of the system across which misinformation might spread. In particular, we show that users' engagement on verified (or unverified) content correlates with the number of friends having similar consumption patterns (homophily). Finally, we measure how this social system responded to the injection of 4, 709 false information. We find that the frequent (and selective) exposure to specific kind of content (polarization) is a good proxy for the detection of homophile clusters where certain kind of rumors are more likely to spread.