Related papers: Global Patterns of Viral Content on WhatsApp
COVID-19 resulted in an infodemic, which could erode public trust, impede virus containment, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape is a key driver of the spread of misinformation. Using misinformation…
What if misinformation is not an information problem at all? To understand the role of news publishers in potentially unintentionally propagating misinformation, we examine how far-right and fringe online groups share and leverage…
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…
Broad topics in online platforms represent a type of meso-scale between individual user-defined communities and the whole platform; they typically consist of related communities that address different facets of a shared topic. Users often…
With the increasing popularity of smart devices, rumors with multimedia content become more and more common on social networks. The multimedia information usually makes rumors look more convincing. Therefore, finding an automatic approach…
In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not…
In micro-blogging platforms, people can connect with others and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, because of homophily and selective exposure, users tend to connect with like-minded people and only read agreeable…
The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to the online proliferation of health-, political-, and conspiratorial-based misinformation. Understanding the reach and belief in this misinformation is vital to managing this crisis, as well as future…
In today's news ecosystem, news sources emerge frequently and can vary widely in intent. This intent can range from benign to malicious, with many tactics being used to achieve their goals. One lesser studied tactic is content republishing,…
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…
Fake news is a growing problem in developing countries with potentially far-reaching consequences. We conduct a randomized experiment in urban Pakistan to evaluate the effectiveness of two educational interventions to counter misinformation…
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…
How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model that…
The propagation of a rumor (unverified information) on a social network is subject to several factors mainly related to the content of this information and especially to the behaviors (profiles) of the actors on this network that…
Disinformation research has proliferated in reaction to widespread false, problematic beliefs purported to explain major social phenomena. Yet while the effects of disinformation are well-known, there is less consensus about its causes; the…
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral…
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…
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…
Owing to the popularity of Online Social Media (OSM), Internet users share a lot of information (including personal) on and across OSM services every day. For example, it is common to find a YouTube video embedded in a blog post with an…
Technology is increasingly used -- unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) -- to spread false information at scale, with potentially broad-reaching societal effects. For example, technology enables increasingly…