Big Data, as a new paradigm, has forced both researchers and industries to rethink data management techniques which has become inadequate in many contexts. Indeed, we deal everyday with huge amounts of collected data about user suggestions and searches. These data require new advanced analysis strategies to be devised in order to profitably leverage this information. Moreover, due to the heterogeneous and fast changing nature of these data, we need to leverage new data storage and management tools to effectively store them. In this paper, we analyze the effect of user searches and suggestions and try to understand how much they influence a user’s social environment. This task is crucial to perform efficient identification of the users that are able to spread their influence across the network. Gathering information about user preferences is a key activity in several scenarios like tourism promotion, personalized marketing, and entertainment suggestions. We show the application of our approach for a huge research project named D-ALL that stands for Data Alliance. In fact, we tried to assess the reaction of users in a competitive environment when they were invited to judge each other. Our results show that the users tend to conform to each other when no tangible rewards are provided while they try to reduce other users’ ratings when it affects getting a tangible prize.
Building from sociotechnical studies of disinformation and of information infrastructures, we examine how – over a period of eleven months – Italian QAnon supporters designed and maintained a distributed, multi- layered “infrastructure of disinformation” that spans multiple social media platforms, messaging apps, online forums, alternative media channels, as well as websites, databases, and content aggregators. Examining disinformation from an infrastructural lens reveals how QAnon disinformation operations extend well-beyond the use of social media and the construction of false narratives. While QAnon conspiracy theories continue to evolve and adapt, the overarching (dis)information infrastructure through which "epistemic evidence" is constructed and constantly updated is rather stable and has increased in size and complexity over time. Most importantly, we also found that deplatforming is a time-sensitive effort. The longer platforms wait to intervene, the harder it is to eradicate infrastructures as they develop new layers, get distributed across the Internet, and can rely on a critical mass of loyal followers. More research is needed to examine whether the key characteristics of the disinformation infrastructure that we identified extend to other disinformation infrastructures, which might include infrastructures put together by climate change denialists, vaccine skeptics, or voter fraud advocates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.