Collective attention in the age of (mis)information

According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media might foster the formation of homophile communities (echo-chambers) around specific worldviews. Such a scenario has been shown to be a vivid environment for the diffusion of false claims, in particular with respect to conspiracy theories. No...

The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or heavily criticized in the Brexit and 2016 U.S. elections. In this work we explore information consumption on Twitter during the last European electoral campaign by analyzing the interaction patterns of official news sources, fake news sources, p...

The creation, dissemination, and consumption of disinformation and fabricated content on social media is a growing concern, especially with the ease of access to such sources, and the lack of awareness of the existence of such false information. In this paper, we present an overview of the techniques explored to date for the combating of disinformation with various forms. We introduce different forms of disinformation, discuss factors related to the spread of disinformation, ...

The rise of fake news in the past decade has brought with it a host of consequences, from swaying opinions on elections to generating uncertainty during a pandemic. A majority of methods developed to combat disinformation either focus on fake news content or malicious actors who generate it. However, the virality of fake news is largely dependent upon the users who propagate it. A deeper understanding of these users can contribute to the development of a framework for identif...

Massive amounts of fake news and conspiratorial content have spread over social media before and after the 2016 US Presidential Elections despite intense fact-checking efforts. How do the spread of misinformation and fact-checking compete? What are the structural and dynamic characteristics of the core of the misinformation diffusion network, and who are its main purveyors? How to reduce the overall amount of misinformation? To explore these questions we built Hoaxy, an open ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of d/misinformation campaigns, but differently from what already witnessed in other debates, the COVID-19 -- intentional or not -- flow of false information put at severe risk the public health, reducing the effec...

Most of the information operations involve users who may foster polarization and distrust toward science and mainstream journalism, without these users being conscious of their role. Gab is well known to be an extremist-friendly platform that performs little control on the posted content. Thus it represents an ideal benchmark for studying phenomena potentially related to polarization such as misinformation spreading. The combination of these factors may lead to hate as well a...

The global spread of the novel coronavirus is affected by the spread of related misinformation -- the so-called COVID-19 Infodemic -- that makes populations more vulnerable to the disease through resistance to mitigation efforts. Here we analyze the prevalence and diffusion of links to low-credibility content about the pandemic across two major social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook. We characterize cross-platform similarities and differences in popular sources, diffusi...

We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we collected a large-scale dataset oftweets associated to thousands of news articles published on Italian disinformation websites. In the observation period,a few outlets accounted for most of the deceptive information circulating on Twitter, which focused on controversialand polarizi...

We measure trends in the diffusion of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. We focus on stories from 570 sites that have been identified as producers of false stories. Interactions with these sites on both Facebook and Twitter rose steadily through the end of 2016. Interactions then fell sharply on Facebook while they continued to rise on Twitter, with the ratio of Facebook engagements to Twitter shares falling by approximately 60 percent....