Related papers: Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and it…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an…
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…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
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 has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was…
While the world has been combating COVID-19 for over three years, an ongoing "Infodemic" due to the spread of fake news regarding the pandemic has also been a global issue. The existence of the fake news impact different aspect of our daily…
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…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
Estimation of mis/disinformation prevalence in social media is crucial for designing mitigation strategies to limit its impact. Yet, such estimations are subject to several uncertainties that are rarely quantified jointly. In this study, we…
The spread of disinformation on social platforms is harmful to society. This harm may manifest as a gradual degradation of public discourse; but it can also take the form of sudden dramatic events such as the 2021 insurrection on Capitol…
Social dialogue, the foundation of our democracies, is currently threatened by disinformation and partisanship, with their disrupting role on individual and collective awareness and detrimental effects on decision-making processes. Despite…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
Misinformation under the form of rumor, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories spreads on social media at alarming rates. One hypothesis is that, since social media are shaped by homophily, belief in misinformation may be more likely to thrive on…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
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…
Health misinformation has been found to be prevalent on social media, particularly in new public health crises in which there is limited scientific information. However, social media can also play a role in limiting and refuting health…
To address the vaccine hesitancy which impairs the efforts of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, it is imperative to understand public vaccination attitudes and timely grasp their changes. In spite of reliability and trustworthiness,…
Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has left many people isolated within their homes; these people are turning to social media for news and social connection, which leaves them vulnerable to believing and sharing misinformation.…
In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to…
Online social media represent an oftentimes unique source of information, and having access to reliable and unbiased content is crucial, especially during crises and contentious events. We study the spread of propaganda and misinformation…