The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence shows that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims, while dissenting information is mainly ignored or might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives on online social media. In this paper we address such a challenge by focusing on the discussion around the Italian Constitutional Referendum by conducting a quantitative, cross-platform analysis on both Facebook public pages and Twitter accounts. We observe the spontaneous emergence of well-separated communities on both platforms. Such a segregation is completely spontaneous, since no contents categorization was performed a priori. By exploring the dynamics behind the discussion, we find that users tend to restrict their attention to a specific set of Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. Finally, taking advantage of automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis techniques, we are able to identify the most controversial topics inside and across both platforms. Thus, we measure the distance between how a certain topic is presented in the posts/tweets and the related users' emotional response. Our results provide interesting insights for the understanding of the evolution of the core narratives behind different echo chambers and for the early detection of massive viral phenomena around false claims.

News Consumption during the Italian Referendum: A Cross-Platform Analysis on Facebook and Twitter / M.D. Vicario, S. Gaito, W. Quattrociocchi, M. Zignani, F. Zollo - In: Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), 2017 IEEE International Conference on[s.l] : IEEE, 2017 Oct. - ISBN 9781509050048. - pp. 648-657 (( convegno International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) tenutosi a Tokyo nel 2017 [10.1109/DSAA.2017.33].

News Consumption during the Italian Referendum: A Cross-Platform Analysis on Facebook and Twitter

S.T. Gaito;M. Zignani;
2017

Abstract

The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence shows that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims, while dissenting information is mainly ignored or might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives on online social media. In this paper we address such a challenge by focusing on the discussion around the Italian Constitutional Referendum by conducting a quantitative, cross-platform analysis on both Facebook public pages and Twitter accounts. We observe the spontaneous emergence of well-separated communities on both platforms. Such a segregation is completely spontaneous, since no contents categorization was performed a priori. By exploring the dynamics behind the discussion, we find that users tend to restrict their attention to a specific set of Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. Finally, taking advantage of automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis techniques, we are able to identify the most controversial topics inside and across both platforms. Thus, we measure the distance between how a certain topic is presented in the posts/tweets and the related users' emotional response. Our results provide interesting insights for the understanding of the evolution of the core narratives behind different echo chambers and for the early detection of massive viral phenomena around false claims.
information spreading; news consumption; cross-platform comparison; online social media
Settore INF/01 - Informatica
ott-2017
Book Part (author)
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
08259827.pdf

accesso riservato

Tipologia: Publisher's version/PDF
Dimensione 2.11 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
2.11 MB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri   Richiedi una copia
Pubblicazioni consigliate

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/549365
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 23
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 11
social impact