Related papers: Polarization of the Vaccination Debate on Facebook
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…
Health misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about the role of social media in polarization and social stability. While previous research has identified a…
Despite their playful purpose social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized…
Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse,…
Background: Social media chatter in 2020 has been largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing research shows that COVID-19 discourse is highly politicized, with political preferences linked to beliefs and disbeliefs about the…
Opposition and hesitancy to vaccination have been one of the major threats to global health. Social media sites have been suspected as a breeding ground of misleading narratives about vaccines, but little is known about how pervasive…
The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 has highlighted the complex interplay between vaccine hesitancy and societal polarization. In this study, we analyse the dynamical polarization within a social network as well as the network…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter…
How information consumption affects behaviour is an open and widely debated research question. A popular hypothesis states that the so-called infodemic has a substantial impact on orienting individual decisions. A competing hypothesis…
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…
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this…
The kick-off of vaccination campaigns in Europe, starting in late December 2020, has been followed by the online spread of controversies and conspiracies surrounding vaccine validity and efficacy. We study Twitter discussions in three major…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
Societies worldwide have witnessed growing rifts separating advocates and opponents of vaccinations and other COVID-19 countermeasures. With the rollout of vaccination campaigns, German-speaking regions exhibited much lower vaccination…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…