Debunking in a world of tribes

By Fabiana Zollo, Alessandro Bessi, Michela Del Vicario, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, L. Shekhtman, Shlomo Havlin, Walter Quattrociocchi. PLoS ONE, 2015

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, in such a disintermediated environment misinformation is pervasive and attempts to debunk are often undertaken to contrast this trend. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of debunking on Facebook through a quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan 2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users usually consuming proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook US interact with specific debunking posts. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. However, both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. Then, we measure how users from both echo chambers interacted with 50,220 debunking posts accounting for both users consumption patterns and the sentiment expressed in their comments. Sentiment analysis reveals a dominant negativity in the comments to debunking posts. Furthermore, such posts remain mainly confined to the scientific echo chamber. Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97972abed8c6d30978b35b7066c3cd7c9f2966de

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Citations in the corpus

Political Attitudes and the Processing of Misinformation Corrections (2018, background): “Despite the fact that this evidence was endorsed by the Republican Party and was the official bipartisan US position, the overwhelming majority of participants counter-argued or ignored the worldview-dissonant correction while bringing supportive evidence to mind (also see Jacks & Cameron, 2003; Zol”
An exploratory study of COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter (2020, unknown): “Previous research on the efficacy of fact-checking reveals the corrections often do not have the desired effect and misinformation resists debunking [21].”
Shared identity and shared information in social media: development and validation of the identity bubble reinforcement scale (2018, background): “…al., 2017) and empirical and theoretical perspectives established within social psychology (e.g., Leach et al., 2008; McCroskey et al., 2006) and research on computer-mediated communication (Bakshy et al., 2015; Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Flanagin, 2017; Flanagin et al., 2014; Zollo et al., 2017).”
The COVID-19 social media infodemic (2020, background): “evolution of public debate [12, 13] especially when issues are controversial [14]. Indeed, users online tend to acquire information adhering to their worldviews [15], to ignore dissenting information [16, 17] and to form polarized groups around shared narratives [18, 19]. Furthermore, when polarizat”
Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook (2016, background): “15 Current solutions, such as debunking efforts or algorithmic driven solutions based on the reputation of the source, seem to be ineffective.”
Polarization of the Vaccination Debate on Facebook (2018, background): “The interaction with content dissenting the shared narrative is mainly ignored or might even foment segregation of users, heated debating and thus bursting polarization of opinions [20].”
This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News (2017, background): “The fake content is more negative in general, similar to findings in past work (Zollo et al. 2015b).”