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In the age of social news, it is important to understand the types of reactions that are evoked from news sources with various levels of credibility. In the present work we seek to better understand how users react to trusted and deceptive…
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view, and…
We measure trends in the diffusion of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. We focus on stories from 570 sites that have been identified as producers of false stories. Interactions with these sites on…
Misinformation about critical issues such as climate change and vaccine safety is oftentimes amplified on online social and search platforms. The crowdsourcing of content credibility assessment by laypeople has been proposed as one strategy…
The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors on online social networks (OSN) either unintentionally or intentionally (e.g., for political reasons or even trolling) can have serious consequences such as in the recent case of rumors about Ebola…
In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon,…
In the digital era, information consumption is predominantly channeled through online news media disseminated on social media platforms. Understanding the complex dynamics of the news media environment and users habits within the digital…
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even…
This thesis addresses two paradoxes: (1) why empirical studies find that fake news represent only a small share of the information consulted and shared on social media despite the absence of editorial control or journalistic norms, and (2)…
Misinformation posting and spreading in Social Media is ignited by personal decisions on the truthfulness of news that may cause wide and deep cascades at a large scale in a fraction of minutes. When individuals are exposed to information,…
In this paper we investigate what folk models of misinformation exist through semi-structured interviews with a sample of 235 social media users. Work on social media misinformation does not investigate how ordinary users - the target of…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Rumor spreading on online social media is presenting a significant threat to society of post-truth epoch. Extensive efforts have been devoted to rumor identification and debunking, assuming that a specific rumor propagation is a single…
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a…
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…
As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours,…
An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is…
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.…
As the novel coronavirus spread globally, a growing public panic was expressed over the internet. We examine the public discussion concerning COVID-19 on Twitter. We use a dataset of 67 million tweets from 12 million users collected between…
The rising popularity of social media has radically changed the way news content is propagated, including interactive attempts with new dimensions. To date, traditional news media such as newspapers, television and radio have already…