Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Altay, Sacha; Berriche, Manon; Acerbi, Alberto

doi:10.31234/osf.io/edqc8

Cited by 26 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 73 publications

(96 reference statements)

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“…The first main implication of our results pertains to current discussions of the spread of misinformation on social media. Our results echo the recent works suggesting that initial assessments of the prevalence of fake news, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation on the Internet might have over-estimated the importance of these phenomena [ 34 – 36 ]. Regarding vaccines, it is also possible that our results illustrate the effects of the changes in algorithms and moderating rules made by platforms to address this issue.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2022

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When the threat of COVID-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this pandemic would squash “the anti-vaccine movement”. However, when vaccines started arriving in rich countries at the end of 2020, it appeared that vaccine hesitancy might be an issue even in the context of this major pandemic. Does it mean that the mobilization of vaccine-critical activists on social media is one of the main causes of this reticence to vaccinate against COVID-19? In this paper, we wish to contribute to current work on vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at one of the many mechanisms which can cause reticence towards vaccines: the capacity of vaccine-critical activists to influence a wider public on social media. We analyze the evolution of debates over the COVID-19 vaccine on the French Twittosphere, during two first years of the pandemic, with a particular attention to the spreading capacity of vaccine-critical websites. We address two main questions: 1) Did vaccine-critical contents gain ground during this period? 2) Who were the main actors in the diffusion of these contents? While debates over vaccines experienced a tremendous surge during this period, the share of vaccine-critical contents in these debates remains stable except for a limited number of short periods associated with specific events. Secondly, analyzing the community structure of the re-tweets hyper-graph, we reconstruct the mesoscale structure of the information flows, identifying and characterizing the major communities of users. We analyze their role in the information ecosystem: the largest right-wing community has a typical echo-chamber behavior collecting all the vaccine-critical tweets from outside and recirculating it inside the community. The smaller left-wing community is less permeable to vaccine-critical contents but, has a large capacity to spread it once adopted.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The first main implication of our results pertains to current discussions of the spread of misinformation on social media. Our results echo the recent works suggesting that initial assessments of the prevalence of fake news, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation on the Internet might have over-estimated the importance of these phenomena [29][30][31]. Regarding vaccines, it is also possible that our results illustrate the effects of the changes in algorithms and moderating rules made by platforms to address this issue.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

Faccin¹,

Gargiulo²,

Atlani-Duault³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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When the threat of COVID-19 became widely acknowledged, many hoped that this epidemic would squash "the anti-vaccine movement".However, when vaccines started arriving in rich countries at the end of 2020, it appeared that vaccine hesitancy might be an issue even in the context of this major epidemic. Does it mean that the mobilization of vaccine-critical activists on social media is one of the main causes of this reticence to vaccinate against COVID-19?In this paper, we wish to contribute to current work on vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 epidemic by looking at one of the many mechanisms which can cause reticence towards vaccines: the capacity of vaccine-critical activists to influence a wider public on social media. We analyze the evolution of debates over the COVID-19 vaccine on the FrenchTwittosphere, during two first years of the pandemic, with a particular attention to the spreading capacity of vaccine-critical websites. We address two main questions: 1) Did vaccine-critical contents gain ground during this period? 2) Who were the central actors in the diffusion of these contents? While debates over vaccines experienced a tremendous surge during this period, the share of vaccine-critical contents in these debates remains stable except for a limited number of short periods associated with specific events. Secondly, analyzing the community structure of the re-tweets hyper-graph, we reconstruct the mesoscale structure of the information flows, identifying and characterizing the major communities of users. We analyze their role in the information ecosystem: the largest right-wing community has a typical echo-chamber behavior collecting all the vaccine-critical tweets from outside and recirculating it inside the community. The smaller left-wing community is less permeable to vaccine-critical contents but, has a large capacity to spread it once adopted.

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“…As a result, high costs of accepting misinformation would have to be mirrored in the model by high benefits of accepting reliable information. Second, some evidence suggests that much misinformation, even misinformation that might appear extremely damaging (such as COVID-19 related misinformation, or political fake news), mostly seem to have minimal effects (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017;Altay et al, 2021b;Anderson, 2021;Carey et al, n.d.;Guess, Lockett, et al, 2020;Litman et al, 2020;Valensise et al, 2021;Watts & Rothschild, 2017).…”

Section: Figure 2 Average Acceptance Of Reliable Information and Misi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information?

Acerbi

Altay²,

Mercier

2022

HKS Misinfo Review

Self Cite

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A wealth of interventions have been devised to reduce belief in fake news or the tendency to share such news. By contrast, interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources have received less attention. In this article we show that, given the very limited prevalence of misinformation (including fake news), interventions aimed at reducing acceptance or spread of such news are bound to have very small effects on the overall quality of the information environment, especially compared to interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources. To make this argument, we simulate the effect that such interventions have on a global information score, which increases when people accept reliable information and decreases when people accept misinformation.

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Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Cited by 26 publications

References 73 publications

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

Assessing the influence of French vaccine critics during the two first years of the COVID-19 pandemic

Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information?

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