A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections.

Machado, Caio C. Vieira; Kira, Beatriz; Narayanan, Vidya; Kollányi, Bence; Howard, Philip N.

doi:10.1145/3308560.3316738

Cited by 74 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 Presidential elections in the United States, a growing number of scholars have become concerned with “fake news” phenomena. Political communication scholarship has become devoted to the spread of fake news over online networks and messenger applications, its effects on human behavior and cognition, its relationship with digital content production, and its impact on public discourse and democracy (Del Vicario et al, 2016; Machado, Kira, Narayanan, Kollanyi, & Howard, 2019; Vicario et al, 2016; Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018). Despite a growing body of literature on the phenomenon, a consistent definition of fake news has yet to emerge.…”

Section: Junk News In Contemporary Political Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Neudert

Howard

Kollányi

2019

Social Media + Society

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Voters increasingly rely on social media for news and information about politics. But increasingly, social media has emerged as a fertile soil for deliberately produced misinformation campaigns, conspiracy, and extremist alternative media. How does the sourcing of political news and information define contemporary political communication in different countries in Europe? To understand what users are sharing in their political communication, we analyzed large volumes of political conversation over a major social media platform—in real-time and native languages during campaign periods—for three major European elections. Rather than chasing a definition of what has come to be known as “fake news,” we produce a grounded typology of what users actually shared and apply rigorous coding and content analysis to define the types of sources, compare them in context with known forms of political news and information, and contrast their circulation patterns in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Based on this analysis, we offer a definition of “junk news” that refers to deliberately produced misleading, deceptive, and incorrect propaganda purporting to be real news. In the first multilingual, cross-national comparison of junk news sourcing and consumption over social media, we analyze over 4 million tweets from three elections and find that (1) users across Europe shared substantial amounts of junk news in varying qualities and quantities, (2) amplifier accounts drive low to medium levels of traffic and news sharing, and (3) Europeans still share large amounts of professionally produced information from media outlets, but other traditional sources of political information including political parties and government agencies are in decline.

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Section: Junk News In Contemporary Political Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Neudert

Howard

Kollányi

2019

Social Media + Society

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“…On the other hand, undirected social platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp should be modeled using UDU or UUU configurations. According to our results, information would spread more easily through these platforms, which could be worrisome as they have recently been identified as one of the main sources of misinformation spreading [33].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Directionality reduces the impact of epidemics in multilayer networks

Wang

Aleta

et al. 2019

New J. Phys.

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Our understanding of how diseases spread has greatly benefited from advances in network modeling. However, despite of its importance for disease contagion, the directionality of edges has rarely been taken into account. On the other hand, the introduction of the multilayer framework has made it possible to deal with more complex scenarios in epidemiology such as the interaction between different pathogens or multiple strains of the same disease. In this work, we study in depth the dynamics of disease spreading in directed multilayer networks. Using the generating function approach and numerical simulations of a stochastic susceptible-infected-susceptible model, we calculate the epidemic threshold of synthetic and real-world multilayer systems and show that it is mainly determined by the directionality of the links connecting different layers, regardless of the degree distribution chosen for the layers. Our findings are of utmost interest given the ubiquitous presence of directed multilayer networks and the widespread use of disease-like spreading processes in a broad range of phenomena such as diffusion processes in social and transportation systems.[11] can hinder disease spreading via peer punishment (e.g. prohibiting traveling if infected) and peer rewarding (e.g. free medical treatment from organizations). Both peer punishment and peer rewarding would deviate individual interactions far from symmetry, also inducing directionality in disease contagion. Even more, the own dynamics of the entities producing the diseases might be asymmetrical. For example, the interplay between cancer and the immune system can show asymmetric relationships [12]. There are also diseases with long latent periods that induce complicated dynamics between individuals who develop further the disease and those who do not, such as the interaction between individuals in the primary infection phase of Tuberculosis and those in the active state [13,14]. For those cases, multilayer networks might be able to help disentangling dynamics that would be otherwise hidden.The use of directed multilayer networks is not constrained to diseases that can infect human populations. Indeed, analogous scenarios can be found in the interface between wildlife and livestock, with diseases being endemic in one of them and then being transmitted unidirectionaly to the other [15]. This directionality is particularly relevant in the surveillance of diseases within the livestock industry, where the direction of the livestock interchange between farms can uncover structural changes that would be otherwise hidden [16]. Even more, the recent introduction of high resolution data of face-to-face interactions has also renewed the interest in using directed networks both in human and animal populations [17,18]. This data can be used to build temporal multilayer networks in which the connections between layers, i.e. different time frames, have to be necessarily directed in order to preserve the causality induced by time ordering [19].In this work, we aim at characterizing...

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“…Social media use may have larger political effects during presidential campaigns, when the entire country is attuned to public affairs, than during routine periods (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2013). Even during campaigns, the consequences might be different according to the political climate of the country, as the comparison between the 2017 campaign in Chile (Santana & Huerta Cánepa, 2019) and the 2018 election in Brazil (Machado et al, 2018) suggests, and could also vary in relation to the journalistic roles in each country, examined by Schmitz-Weiss (2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a widespread concern about the distribution of disinformation (Bolgov et al, 2017; Calvo & Aruguete, 2020; Gainous et al, 2016; Kofi Annan Foundation, 2017). Machado and colleagues (2018) studied news articles shared on social media during the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, and concluded that “Brazilian Twitter users are sharing more professional political content on Twitter than junk news” (p. 6). Scholarship has also inquired into incidental news consumption on social media (Serrano-Puche et la., 2018).…”

Section: Actorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimal Effects, Maximum Panic: Social Media and Democracy in Latin America

Mitchelstein

Matassi

Boczkowski

2020

Social Media + Society

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In face of public discourses about the negative effects that social media might have on democracy in Latin America, this article provides a qualitative assessment of existing scholarship about the uses, actors, and effects of platforms for democratic life. Our findings suggest that, first, campaigning, collective action, and electronic government are the main political uses of platforms. Second, politicians and office holders, social movements, news producers, and citizens are the main actors who utilize them for political purposes. Third, there are two main positive effects of these platforms for the democratic process—enabling social engagement and information diffusion—and two main negative ones—the presence of disinformation, and the spread of extremism and hate speech. A common denominator across positive and negative effects is that platforms appear to have minimal effects that amplify pre-existing patterns rather than create them de novo.

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A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections.

Cited by 74 publications

References 4 publications

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Directionality reduces the impact of epidemics in multilayer networks

Minimal Effects, Maximum Panic: Social Media and Democracy in Latin America

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