Trend of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation

Abstract

Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a disintermediation might weaken consensus on social relevant issues in favor of rumors, mistrust, or conspiracy thinking—e.g., chem-trails inducing global warming, the link between vaccines and autism, or the New World Order conspiracy. Previous studies pointed out that consumers of conspiracy-like content are likely to aggregate in homophile clusters—i.e., echo-chambers. Along this path we study, by means of a thorough quantitative analysis, how different topics are consumed inside the conspiracy echo-chamber in the Italian Facebook. Through a semi-automatic topic extraction strategy, we show that the most consumed contents semantically refer to four specific categories: environment, diet, health, and geopolitics. We find similar consumption patterns by comparing users activity (likes and comments) on posts belonging to these different semantic categories. Finally, we model users mobility across the distinct topics finding that the more a user is active, the more he is likely to span on all categories. Once inside a conspiracy narrative users tend to embrace the overall corpus.

Diversity in Unity: Perspectives from Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

“…This is consistent with early psychology conceptualisations of belief in conspiracy theories as an ideological trait (Goertzel, 1994). The belief seems to exist as a global phenomenon as it has been found in various kinds of society (Bessi et al, 2015;Swami 2012;Van Prooijen, 2015) and does not exclusively occur in conflict areas such as the Middle East region as explained by Al-Azm (2011) andGray (2010). However, the result showed that religious fundamentalism did not predict a belief in conspiracies, nor did it interact with NFC.…”

“…A corpus analysis of Facebook comments in Italian shows that people are most persistent in commenting on geopolitical conspiracies compared to environment, diet and health issues (Bessi et al, 2015). In Malaysia, belief in a common Jewish conspiracy to exploit Malaysian resources and people was indicated as an attempt to serve ideological needs; it portrayed society's perceived ability to understand threat and to shape socio-political dynamics within (Swami, 2012).…”

“…It has been suggested that the belief derives from a limitation in thinking processes (Drinkwater et al, 2012;Landau et al, 2015). Furthermore, most findings on the topic show that conspiracy theories predominantly have polarised political standpoints, which are expressed by suspicion or disbelief of other groups (Bessi et al, 2015;Van Prooijen, 2015).…”

The spreading of misinformation online

“…13, beliefs formation and revision is influenced by the way communities attempt to make sense of events or facts. Such a phenomenon is particularly evident on the WWW where users, embedded in homogeneous clusters (14)(15)(16), process information through a shared system of meaning (10,11,17,18) and trigger collective framing of narratives that are often biased toward self-confirmation.…”

Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook

“…Recent works (7) provide empirical evidence of the pivotal role of confirmation bias and selective exposure in online social dynamics. Users, indeed, tend to focus on specific narratives and join polarized groups (i.e., echo chambers) (8)(9)(10), where they end up reinforcing their worldview [even if pieces of content are deliberately false (11,12)] and dismissing contradictory information (13). Discussion and elaboration of narratives in such a segregated environment elicits group polarization and negatively influences user emotion (14-17).…”