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.
Highlights
According to [1], causation is bound to the way communities attempt to make sense to events or facts
If we focus on the lifetime –i.e., the distance in time between the first and the last comment for each user—we notice a remarkable difference within topics
Users polarized on geopolitics subjects are the most persistent in commenting, whereas the less persistent users are those focused on diet narratives
Summary
According to [1], causation is bound to the way communities attempt to make sense to events or facts. Such a phenomenon is evident on the web where users, immersed in homophile and polarized clusters [2,3,4], process information through a shared system of meaning [5, 6]. Social media enabled a direct path from producers to consumers of contents—i.e., disintermediation—changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their opinions [7,8,9,10,11] and confusion about causation may encourage speculation, rumors, and mistrust [12]. Conspiracists tend to explain significant social or political aspects with plots conceived by powerful individuals or organizations having control of PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0134641 August 14, 2015
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