Collective attention in the age of (mis)information

Social dialogue, the foundation of our democracies, is currently threatened by disinformation and partisanship, with their disrupting role on individual and collective awareness and detrimental effects on decision-making processes. Despite a great deal of attention to the news sphere itself, little is known about the subtle interplay between the offer and the demand for information. Still, a broader perspective on the news ecosystem, including both the producers and the consu...

With the rapid increase in access to internet and the subsequent growth in the population of online social media users, the quality of information posted, disseminated and consumed via these platforms is an issue of growing concern. A large fraction of the common public turn to social media platforms and in general the internet for news and even information regarding highly concerning issues such as COVID-19 symptoms. Given that the online information ecosystem is extremely n...

We conducted ethnographic research with 31 misinformation creators and consumers in Brazil and the US before, during, and after a major election to understand the consumption and production of election and medical misinformation. This study contributes to research on misinformation ecosystems by focusing on poorly understood small players, or "micro-influencers", who create misinformation in peer-to-peer networks. We detail four key tactics that micro-influencers use. First, ...

As people rely on social media as their primary sources of news, the spread of misinformation has become a significant concern. In this large-scale study of news in social media we analyze eleven million posts and investigate propagation behavior of users that directly interact with news accounts identified as spreading trusted versus malicious content. Unlike previous work, which looks at specific rumors, topics, or events, we consider all content propagated by various news ...

False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and why it succeeds in deceiving readers are critical to develop efficient detection algorithms and tools for early detection. A recent surge of research in this area has aimed to address the key issues using methods based on feature engineering, graph mining, and informa...

Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized groups around a common system of beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for users decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored info...

The Web consists of numerous Web communities, news sources, and services, which are often exploited by various entities for the dissemination of false information. Yet, we lack tools and techniques to effectively track the propagation of information across the multiple diverse communities, and to model the interplay and influence between them. Also, we lack an understanding of what the role and impact of emerging communities and services on the Web are, and how such communiti...

The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal challenges. To combat misinformation effectively, it is crucial to understand the online information environment and news consumption patterns. Most existing research has primarily focused on single topics or individual countries, lacking cross-cou...

According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing. In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$ tweets exchanged during the last Italian elections. By using an entropy-based null model discounting the activity of the users, we first identify potential political alliances within the group of verified accounts: if two verified users are re...

The rise of the internet and computational power in recent years allowed for the exponential growth of misinformation phenomena. An issue that was a non-issue a decade ago, became a challenge for societal cohesion. The emergence of this new threat has led many stakeholders, especially in Europe, to act in order to tackle this phenomenon. This paper provides in its first part a literature review on misinformation in Europe, and in its second part a webometrics analysis on the ...