Infodemics on Youtube: Reliability of Content and Echo Chambers on COVID-19 (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED Social media radically changed how information is consumed and reported and elicited a disintermediated access to an unprecedented amount of content. The world health organization (WHO) coined the term infodemics to identify the information overabundance during an epidemic. Indeed, the spread of inaccurate and misleading information may alter behaviours and complicate crisis management and health responses. This paper addresses information diffusion during the COVID-19 pandemic period with a massive data analysis on YouTube. First, we analyze more than 2M users’ engagement in 13000 videos released by 68 different YouTube channels, with different political bias and fact-checking indexes. We then investigate the relationship between each user’s political preference and her/his consumption of questionable/reliable information. Our results, quantified using information theory measures, provide evidence for the existence of echo chambers across two dimensions represented by the political bias and by the trustworthiness of information channels. Finally, we observe that the echo chamber structure cannot be reproduced after properly randomizing the users’ interaction patterns.

Did COVID-19 Blur Partisan Boundaries? A Comparison of Partisan Affinity and Source Heterophily in Online Alternative News-Sharing Networks Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Other studies have found high levels of information homophily mostly among the most active users (B. Jiang, Karami, et al, 2021) and in communities that are more politically right-leaning (di Marco et al, 2021). Highly homophilic information environments are also more vulnerable to the spread of extreme opinions (Asatani et al, 2021).…”

“…In contrast to many online news-sharing studies that focus on a single social media platform (Barberá, 2015;di Marco et al, 2021;Schmidt et al, 2017) or that analyze multiple platforms separately, we consider all included platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, VKontakte, and TikTok) as part of the same news-sharing network. A distinct advantage of this approach is that it allows us to account for source heterophily that manifests across multiple platforms.…”

Political ideology shapes risk and benefit judgments of COVID‐19 vaccines

“…One of the reasons that produces high levels of political polarization is people's tendency to gather information from media, social media, and acquaintances who are likely to share their opinions. By doing so, they can get isolated in echochambers where it is difficult to hear messages that contradict one's own views (Cinelli et al., 2021; Di Marco et al., 2021; Sharma et al., 2021). This process exacerbates confirmation bias and opinions on a specific subject end up diverging beyond a level where they are easily reconcilable.…”