Abstract
Despite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized groups around a common system of beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for users’ decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization. Along this path, through a thorough quantitative analysis we approach connectivity patterns of 1.2 M Facebook users engaged with two very conflicting narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. Analyzing such data, we quantitatively investigate the effect of two mechanisms (namely challenge avoidance and reinforcement seeking) behind confirmation bias, one of the major drivers of human behavior in social media. We find that challenge avoidance mechanism triggers the emergence of two distinct and polarized groups of users (i.e., echo chambers) who also tend to be surrounded by friends having similar systems of beliefs. Through a network based approach, we show how the reinforcement seeking mechanism limits the influence of neighbors and primarily drives the selection and diffusion of contents even among like-minded users, thus fostering the formation of highly polarized sub-clusters within the same echo chamber. Finally, we show that polarized users reinforce their preexisting beliefs by leveraging the activity of their like-minded neighbors, and this trend grows with the user engagement suggesting how peer influence acts as a support for reinforcement seeking.
Highlights
Despite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions
Segments nreupmrebseernotfthliekeasvleorgag2(eθo(uf )p)eoefr u both in science and influence probabilities regarding conspiracy users with commua liking activity in the range of the corresponding bin, and they are colored according to the total number of users involved in such a range. In both communities, polarized users reinforce their preexisting beliefs by leveraging the activity of their like-minded neighbors, and this trend grows with the user engagement suggesting how peer influence acts as a support for reinforcement seeking
Our analyses showed the action of challenge avoidance mechanism in the emergence, around the selected narratives, of two well-separated and polarized groups of users who tend to be surrounded by friends having similar systems of beliefs
Summary
Despite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization Along this path, through a thorough quantitative analysis we approach connectivity patterns of 1.2 M Facebook users engaged with two very conflicting narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. Confirmation bias - i.e., the tendency to seek, select, and interpret information coherently with one’s system of beliefs9 - helps, to account for users’ decisions about whether to promote content[2,10,11,12] The action of this cognitive bias may lead to the emergence of homogeneous and polarized communities - i.e., echo-chambers[13,14,15], facilitating fake news and, more in general, misinformation cascades[3]. Challenge avoidance - i.e., the fact that people do not want to find out that they are wrong, Reinforcement seeking - i.e., the fact that people want to find out that they are right
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