Abstract
Spreading rumors on the Internet has become increasingly pervasive due to the proliferation of online social media. This paper investigates how rumors are amplified by a group of users who share similar interests or views, dubbed as an echo chamber. To this end, we identify and analyze ‘rumor’ echo chambers, each of which is a group of users who have participated in propagating common rumors. By collecting and analyzing 125 recent rumors from six popular fact-checking sites, and their associated 289,202 tweets/retweets generated by 176,362 users, we find that the rumors that are spread by rumor echo chamber members tend to be more viral and quickly propagated than those that are not spread by echo chamber members. We propose the notion of an echo chamber network that represents relations among rumor echo chambers. By identifying the hub rumor echo chambers (in terms of connectivity to other rumor echo chambers) in the echo chamber network, we show that the top 10% of hub rumor echo chambers contribute to propagation of 24% rumors by eliciting more than 36% of retweets, implying that core rumor echo chambers significantly contribute to rumor spreads.
Highlights
Online media such as social networks, online communities, instant messages, and e-mails have become popular vectors in disseminating news, content, political campaigns, scientific findings, or product advertisements
We identify the hub echo chambers in the given echo chamber network, and show that the top 10% of hub echo chambers are responsible for 24% of all the rumor cascades, eliciting more than 36% of retweets, which implies that core rumor echo chambers significantly contribute to rumor spreads in social media
Inspired from this, we measure whether the selective exposure is observed in rumor echo chambers identified in this paper
Summary
Online media such as social networks, online communities, instant messages, and e-mails have become popular vectors in disseminating news, content, political campaigns, scientific findings, or product advertisements. The relations between rumor propagation patterns and individuals’ interest (or political standpoint)[11,12], behavioral characteristics[7,13], or social structures[14] have been investigated While these studies have provided valuable insights into understanding rumor spreads and their associated factors, relatively little attention has been paid to how a group of users that share similar interests or political views play roles in rumor propagation. Social media such as Twitter or Facebook allows users with diverse backgrounds (e.g., political viewpoint, race, or gender) to share news, information, or opinions. By investigating the characteristics of the identified rumor echo chambers, we find that rumor echo chambers tend to reveal the selective exposure and political homophily, well-known distinct properties of political echo chambers reported in the social science literature
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