Agenda

Fabiana Zollo, DAIS - Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Abstract:
Information, rumors, debates shape and reinforce the perception of reality and heavily impact public opinion. Indeed, the way in which individuals influence each other is one of the foundational challenges in several disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, and economics. In particular, on online social networks users tend to select information that is coherent to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like-minded people –i.e, echo chambers– where they reinforce and polarize their pre-existing opinions. Such a context exacerbates misinformation, which has traditionally represented a political, social, and economic risk. In this talk we explore how we can understand social dynamics by analyzing massive data on Facebook. By means of a tight quantitative analysis on 376 millions users we characterize the anatomy of news consumption on a global scale. We show that users tend to focus on a limited set of pages (selective exposure) eliciting a sharp and polari zed community structure among news outlets. Moreover, we find similar patterns around the Brexit –the British referendum to leave the European Union– debate, where we observe the spontaneous emergence of two well segregated and polarized groups of users around news oultets. Our findings provide interesting insights about the determinants of polarization and the evolution of core narratives on online debating, and highlight the crucial role of data science techniques to understand and map the information space on online social media. The main aim of this research stream is to identify non-trivial proxies for the early detection of massive (mis)informational cascades. Furthermore, by combining users traces we are able to draft the main concepts and beliefs of the core narrative of an echo chamber and its related perceptions.