Debunking in a world of tribes

Abstract

Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, in such a disintermediated environment misinformation is pervasive and attempts to debunk are often undertaken to contrast this trend. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of debunking on Facebook through a quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan 2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users usually consuming proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook US interact with specific debunking posts. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. However, both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. Then, we measure how users from both echo chambers interacted with 50,220 debunking posts accounting for both users consumption patterns and the sentiment expressed in their comments. Sentiment analysis reveals a dominant negativity in the comments to debunking posts. Furthermore, such posts remain mainly confined to the scientific echo chamber. Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.

Modeling confirmation bias and polarization

“…Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information12345. The wide availability of content on the web fosters the aggregation of likeminded people where the discussion tends to enforce group polarization67.…”

Dealing with digital misinformation: a polarised context of narratives and tribes

“…We start our analysis by focusing on how information gets consumed by users on Facebook, considering both the Italian (Bessi et al., ; Del Vicario et al., ) and the US (Zollo et al., ) data sets. At the time of downloading, Facebook's paradigm allowed users to interact with contents by means of likes, comments and shares (reactions were not implemented yet).…”

“…As confirmation bias plays a pivotal role in selection criteria, we may assume that debunking activity is likely to sound to Conspiracy users as information dissenting from their preferred narrative. In this section, we investigated the users’ response to debunking attempts on US Facebook (Zollo et al., ).…”

“…As anticipated, our approach takes advantage of both the question‐framing capabilities of social sciences and the experimental and quantitative tools of hard sciences. In this section, we present a collection of data sets (Bessi et al., , ; Zollo et al., , ; Del Vicario et al., , ; Schmidt et al., , ) that lay the groundwork for our analysis.…”

“…Finally, we identified an additional category of pages, that of ‘debunking’, i.e. information aiming at correcting false conspiracy theories and untruthful rumours circulating online (Zollo et al., ).…”