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Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, 8(10), p. e0134641, 2015

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134641

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Trend of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation

Journal article published in 2015 by Alessandro Bessi ORCID, Fabiana Zollo, Michela Del Vicario, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli ORCID, Walter Quattrociocchi
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a disintermediation might weaken consensus on social relevant issues in favor of rumors, mistrust, or conspiracy thinking—e.g., chem-trails inducing global warming, the link between vaccines and autism, or the New World Order conspiracy. Previous studies pointed out that consumers of conspiracy-like content are likely to aggregate in homophile clusters—i.e., echo-chambers. Along this path we study, by means of a thorough quantitative analysis, how different topics are consumed inside the conspiracy echo-chamber in the Italian Facebook. Through a semi-automatic topic extraction strategy, we show that the most consumed contents semantically refer to four specific categories: environment, diet, health, and geopolitics. We find similar consumption patterns by comparing users activity (likes and comments) on posts belonging to these different semantic categories. Finally, we model users mobility across the distinct topics finding that the more a user is active, the more he is likely to span on all categories. Once inside a conspiracy narrative users tend to embrace the overall corpus.