Related papers: Emotional Dynamics in the Age of Misinformation
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process…
The explosive growth of online misinformation, such as false claims, has affected the social behavior of online users. In order to be persuasive and mislead the audience, false claims are made to trigger emotions in their audience. This…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
Social media users drive the spread of misinformation online by sharing posts that include erroneous information or commenting on controversial topics with unsubstantiated arguments often in earnest. Work on echo chambers has suggested that…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{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…
Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a {\em disintermediation} weakened consensus on social relevant issues in favor of…
The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called {\em wisdom of…
With the emergence and rapid proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites, recent years have witnessed a surge of misinformation spreading in our daily life. Drawing on a large-scale dataset which covers more than…
Recent findings showed that users on Facebook tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups -- i.e., echo chambers. Such a tendency dominates information cascades and might affect public…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
In online social networks, users tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like minded people. Polarization as well as its effects on online social interactions have been extensively…
Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant rise in the spread of misinformation on online platforms such as Twitter. Oftentimes this growth is blamed on the idea of the "echo chamber." However, the behavior said to…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…
With the advent of social media, an increasing number of netizens are sharing and reading posts and news online. However, the huge volumes of misinformation (e.g., fake news and rumors) that flood the internet can adversely affect people's…
Rumours in online social media pose significant risks to modern society, motivating the need for better understanding of how they develop. We focus specifically on the interface between emotion and rumours in threaded discourses, building…
One of the critical emerging challenges in climate change communication is the prevalence of conspiracy theories. This paper discusses some of the major conspiracy theories related to climate change found in a large Twitter corpus. We use a…
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…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…