Collective attention in the age of (mis)information

Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its potentially harmful effects. This will require a better understanding of how the Internet spreads content, how people process news, and how the two interact. We review the state of knowledge in these areas and discuss two broad potential miti...

The landscape of information has experienced significant transformations with the rapid expansion of the internet and the emergence of online social networks. Initially, there was optimism that these platforms would encourage a culture of active participation and diverse communication. However, recent events have brought to light the negative effects of social media platforms, leading to the creation of echo chambers, where users are exposed only to content that aligns with t...

Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the wide availability of user-provided content and the direct path between producers and consumers of information often foster confusion about causations, encouraging mistrust, rumors, and even conspiracy thinking. In order to contrast such a ...

The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies showed the tendency of users to ignore dissenti...

Online platforms play a relevant role in the creation and diffusion of false or misleading news. Concerningly, the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping a communication network - barely considered in the literature - which reflects the emergence of collective attention towards a topic that rapidly gained universal interest. Here, we characterize the dynamics of this network on Twitter, analyzing how unreliable content distributes among its users. We find that a minority of accounts is...

A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific topics. These false information campaigns can have dire consequences to the public: mutating their opinions and actions, especially with respect to critical world events like major elections. Evidently, the problem of false information on t...

The debate around misinformation and its potentially detrimental effects on public opinion is complex and multifaceted, to the extent that even the relevant academic research has not found unanimity on the prevalence and consumption of misinformation compared with mainstream content. The methodological framework presented here emphasises the importance of considering data representative of the complexity of the phenomenon and metrics that control for possible scale effects. B...

In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an \textit{Untrustworthiness} score, that tells us how frequently they engage with disinformation content, we are able to see that such bad information consumption habits are not equally distributed across the users; adopting a network analysis app...

Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or repulsive. Whereas factual information must often convey uncomfortable truths, misinformation can have little regard for veracity and leverage psychological processes which increase its attractiveness and proliferation on social media. In this r...

The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around shared narratives where dissenting information is ignored. In this environment, users cooperate to frame and reinforce their shared narrative making any attempt at debunking inefficient. Such a configuration occurs even in the consumption of ne...