Disinformation Echo-Chambers on Facebook

Following the 2016 US presidential election and the now overwhelming evidence of Russian interference, there has been an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of "fake news". To date, research on false news has centered around detecting content from low-credibility sources and analyzing how this content spreads across online platforms. Misinformation poses clear risks, yet research agendas that overemphasize veracity miss the opportunity to truly understand the Kremlin-led ...

In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating t...

The computer science research community has became increasingly interested in the study of social media due to their pervasiveness in the everyday life of millions of individuals. Methodological questions and technical challenges abound as more and more data from social platforms become available for analysis. This data deluge not only yields the unprecedented opportunity to unravel questions about online individuals' behavior at scale, but also allows to explore the potentia...

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 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...

How, in 20 short years, did we go from the promise of the internet to democratize access to knowledge and make the world more understanding and enlightened, to the litany of daily horrors that is today's internet? We are awash in disinformation consisting of lies, conspiracies, and general nonsense, all with real-world implications ranging from horrific humans rights violations to threats to our democracy and global public health. Although the internet is vast, the peddlers o...

With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility. Therefore, thousands of scientific papers have been published in a relatively short period, making researchers of different disciplines struggle with an information overload problem. The aim of this survey is threefold: (1) we present the r...

Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically creating and managing coordinated networks of accounts, to reach millions of social network users with persuasive messages, specifically targeted to topics each individual user is sensitive to, and ultimately influencing the outcome on a targeted issue...

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 ...

In online social networks, users tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like minded people. Polarization as well as its effects on online social interactions have been extensively investigated. Still, the relation between group formation and personality traits remains unclear. A better understanding of the cognitive and psychological determinants of online social dynamics might help to design more efficient communicat...