Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation

Abstract

The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around shared beliefs, interests, worldviews and narratives. In spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called collective intelligence unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories—e.g., chemtrails, reptilians or the Illuminati—are pervasive in online social networks (OSN). In this work we study, on a sample of 1.2 million of individuals, how information related to very distinct narratives—i.e. main stream scientific and conspiracy news—are consumed and shape communities on Facebook. Our results show that polarized communities emerge around distinct types of contents and usual consumers of conspiracy news result to be more focused and self-contained on their specific contents. To test potential biases induced by the continued exposure to unsubstantiated rumors on users’ content selection, we conclude our analysis measuring how users respond to 4,709 troll information—i.e. parodistic and sarcastic imitation of conspiracy theories. We find that 77.92% of likes and 80.86% of comments are from users usually interacting with conspiracy stories.

Understanding Conspiracy Online: Social Media and the Spread of Suspicious Thinking

“…However, conspiracy rumors showed a positive correlation between lifetime and how many users were exposed to the rumor: longer lived conspiracies have more impact on social media, validating some of the ideas from Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) on cascades. This common lifetime was also reproduced by Bessi et al (2015). Bessi et al (2015) took a closer look at how posts were commented, liked, and shared on Facebook.…”

“…This common lifetime was also reproduced by Bessi et al (2015). Bessi et al (2015) took a closer look at how posts were commented, liked, and shared on Facebook. There were no significant differences in commenting patterns for conspiracy posts as compared to science posts, but conspiracy posts were more likely to be liked and shared by users (Bessi et al, 2015).…”

“…These results were replicated by Mocanu et al (2015). However, Bessi et al (2015; and Mocanu et al (2015) did not study the emotions and sentiments associated with comments in their work, for example, whether particular types of posts were responded to positively or negatively. Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) argued intense emotions have a role in the spread of conspiracy, so understanding the emotions associated with this sharing seems relevant.…”

“…Bessi et al (2015) took a closer look at how posts were commented, liked, and shared on Facebook. There were no significant differences in commenting patterns for conspiracy posts as compared to science posts, but conspiracy posts were more likely to be liked and shared by users (Bessi et al, 2015). Bessi et al (2016) also studied videos on both Facebook and YouTube and noted science and conspiracy posts have similar user interaction profiles, which were measured by the numbers of likes and comments videos received.…”

“…Bessi and Del Vicario have, across at least three papers (Bessi et al, 2015;Bessi et al, 2016;Del Vicario et al, 2016) used a single definition of polarization: a user's polarization towards conspiracy is the fraction of their interactions (posts, comments, and likes) that are only directed towards conspiracy news. Users who commented frequently on scientific posts were considered to hold a scientific polarization.…”