Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Social Determinants of Content Selection in the Age of (Mis)Information

  • Chapter
Social Informatics (SocInfo 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8851))

Included in the following conference series:

  • International Conference on Social Informatics

Abstract

Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called collective intelligence, conspiracy theories – e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism – find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. Users preferentially consume information according to their system of beliefs and the strife within users of opposite worldviews (e.g., scientific and conspiracist) may result in heated debates. In this work we provide a genuine example of information consumption on a set of 1.2 million of Facebook Italian users. We show by means of a thorough quantitative analysis that information supporting different worldviews – i.e. scientific and conspiracist news – are consumed in a comparable way. Moreover, we measure the effect of 4709 evidently false information (satirical version of conspiracist stories) and 4502 debunking memes (information aiming at contrasting unsubstantiated rumors) on polarized users of conspiracy claims.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabasi, A.-L.L., Brewer, D., Christakis, N., Contractor, N., Fowler, J., Gutmann, M., Jebara, T., King, G., Macy, M., Roy, D., Van Alstyne, M.: Social science. computational social science. Science 323(5915), 721–723 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Conte, R., Gilbert, N., Bonelli, G., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Deffuant, G., Kertesz, J., Loreto, V., Moat, S., Nadal, J.-P., Sanchez, A., Nowak, A., Flache, A., Miguel, M.S., Helbing, D.: Manifesto of computational social science. European Physical Journal Special Topics EPJST 214 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E., Hancock, J.T.: Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(24), 8788–8790 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Aral, S., Muchnik, L., Sundararajan, A.: Distinguishing influence-based contagion from homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(51), 21544–21549 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Mocanu, D., Rossi, L., Zhang, Q., Karsai, M., Quattrociocchi, W.: Collective attention in the age of (mis)information. CoRR, abs/1403.3344 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bessi, A., Coletto, M., Davidescu, G.A., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., Quattrociocchi, W.: Science vs conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information. Technical report, IMT Lucca (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I., Boyd, D.: The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 tunisian and egyptian revolutions. International Journal of Communications 5, 1375–1405 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lewis, K., Gonzalez, M., Kaufman, J.: Social selection and peer influence in an online social network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(1), 68–72 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Leskovec, J., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J.: Signed networks in social media. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010, pp. 1361–1370. ACM, New York (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Kleinberg, J.: Analysis of large-scale social and information networks. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 371 (2013)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Kahn, R., Kellner, D.: New media and internet activism: from the ‘battle of seattle’ to blogging. New Media and Society 6(1), 87–95 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Howard, P.N.: The arab spring’s cascading effects. Miller-McCune (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J., Rivero, A., Moreno, Y.: The dynamics of protest recruitment through an online network. Scientific Report (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Bond, R.M., Fariss, C.J., Jones, J.J., Kramer, A.D.I., Marlow, C., Settle, J.E., Fowler, J.H.: A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature 489(7415), 295–298 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Quattrociocchi, W., Caldarelli, G., Scala, A.: Opinion dynamics on interacting networks: media competition and social influence. Scientific Reports (May 4, 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Aral, S., Walker, D.: Identifying influential and susceptible members of social networks. Science 337(6092), 337–341 (2012)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Levy, P.: Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Malone, T.W., Klein, M.: Harnessing collective intelligence to address global climate change. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 2(3), 15–26 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Kuklinski, J.H., Quirk, P.J., Jerit, J., Schwieder, D., Rich, R.F.: Misinformation and the currency of democratic citizenship. Journal of Politics 62(3), 790–816 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Nyhan, B., Reifler, J.: When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior 32(2), 303–330 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Howell, L.: Digital wildfires in a hyperconnected world. In: Report 2013. World Economic Forum (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Bessi, A., Coletto, M., Davidescu, G.A., Scala, A., Quattrociocchi, W.: Misinformation in the loop: the emergence of narratives in osn. Technical report, IMT Lucca (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Sunstein, C.R., Vermeule, A.: Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures*. Journal of Political Philosophy 17(2), 202–227 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. McKelvey, K., Menczer, F.: Truthy: Enabling the study of online social networks. In: Proc. CSCW 2013 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Meade, M.L., Roediger, H.L.: Explorations in the social contagion of memory. Memory & Cognition 30(7), 995–1009 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Mann, C., Stewart, F.: Internet Communication and Qualitative Research: A Handbook for Researching Online (New Technologies for Social Research series). Sage Publications Ltd. (September 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Garrett, R.K., Weeks, B.E.: The promise and peril of real-time corrections to political misperceptions. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013, pp. 1047–1058. ACM, New York (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Buckingham Shum, S., Aberer, K., Schmidt, A., Bishop, S., Lukowicz, P., Anderson, S., Charalabidis, Y., Domingue, J., Freitas, S., Dunwell, I., Edmonds, B., Grey, F., Haklay, M., Jelasity, M., Karpištšenko, A., Kohlhammer, J., Lewis, J., Pitt, J., Sumner, R., Helbing, D.: Towards a global participatory platform. The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214(1), 109–152 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Carletti, T., Fanelli, D., Grolli, S., Guarino, A.: How to make an efficient propaganda. Europhysics Letters 2(74), 222–228 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Centola, D.: The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment. Science 329(5996), 1194–1197 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Paolucci, M., Eymann, T., Jager, W., Sabater-Mir, J., Conte, R., Marmo, S., Picascia, S., Quattrociocchi, W., Balke, T., Koenig, S., Broekhuizen, T., Trampe, D., Tuk, M., Brito, I., Pinyol, I., Villatoro, D.: Social Knowledge for e-Governance: Theory and Technology of Reputation. Roma: ISTC-CNR (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Quattrociocchi, W., Conte, R., Lodi, E.: Opinions manipulation: Media, power and gossip. Advances in Complex Systems 14(4), 567–586 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  33. Quattrociocchi, W., Paolucci, M., Conte, R.: On the effects of informational cheating on social evaluations: image and reputation through gossip. IJKL 5(5/6), 457–471 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Bekkers, V., Beunders, H., Edwards, A., Moody, R.: New media, micromobilization, and political agenda setting: Crossover effects in political mobilization and media usage. The Information Society 27(4), 209–219 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Quattrociocchi, W., Amblard, F., Galeota, E.: Selection in scientific networks. Social Network Analysis and Mining 2(3), 229–237 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Facebook. Using the graph api. Website, 8 (2013) (January 1, 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Viswanath, B., Mislove, A., Cha, M., Gummadi, K.P.: On the evolution of user interaction in facebook. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, WOSN 2009, pp. 37–42. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Hogg, M.A., Blaylock, D.L.: Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty. Blackwell/Claremont Applied Social Psychology Series. Wiley (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Fine, G.A., Campion-Vincent, V., Heath, C.: Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend. Social problems and social issues (Transaction publishers)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Bauer, M.: Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology. Cambridge University Press (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Kaplan, E.L., Meier, P.: Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 53(282), 457–481 (1958)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IUSS Institute for Advanced Study, Piazza della Vittoria 5, 27100, Pavia, Italy

    Alessandro Bessi

  2. IMT Alti Studi Lucca, Piazza S. Ponziano 6, 55100, Lucca, Italy

    Alessandro Bessi, Guido Caldarelli, Michela Del Vicario & Walter Quattrociocchi

  3. ISC-CNR Uos “Sapienza”, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Guido Caldarelli & Antonio Scala

  4. Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Walter Quattrociocchi

Authors
  1. Alessandro Bessi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Guido Caldarelli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Michela Del Vicario
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Antonio Scala
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Walter Quattrociocchi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. Stanford Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, 94305-3096, Stanford, CA, USA

    Daniel McFarland

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Bessi, A., Caldarelli, G., Del Vicario, M., Scala, A., Quattrociocchi, W. (2014). Social Determinants of Content Selection in the Age of (Mis)Information. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13733-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13734-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation