Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modeling fake news as complex contagion
By Petter Törnberg. PLoS ONE, 2018
377 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society. This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence. This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation. The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion. These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/749f0250b6e9b740cfdf591ee3ae815825ecc91f
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In Sociology and Political Science
- Jay J. Van Bavel
- Elizabeth Harris
- Vikram V. Ramaswamy
- Olga Russakovsky
- Angelina Wang
- Joshua A. Tucker
- Mark A. Kayser
- Michael Peress
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Towards Intersectionality in Machine Learning: Including More Identities, Handling Underrepresentation, and Performing Evaluation (2022, methodology): “that of simulations as testbeds and tools for understanding sociotechical systems such as in modeling recommender systems [17, 21, 45, 70, 89] and online information diffusion [44, 48, 119], rather than as a source for more data.”
- Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “A minority of users may produce the majority of misinformation, but this motivated minority can have significant destabilizing effects on the majority of users in informational networks (Juul & Porter, 2019; Törnberg, 2018).”