TY  - JOUR
N2  - The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15??where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., ?echo chambers.? Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades? size.
SN  - 1091-6490
UR  - http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.abstract
AV  - public
TI  - The spreading of misinformation online
KW  - Misinformation
KW  -  Virality
KW  -  Facebook
KW  -  Rumor spreading
KW  -  Cascades
EP  - 559
ID  - eprints3020
SP  - 554
A1  - Del Vicario, Michela
A1  - Bessi, Alessandro
A1  - Zollo, Fabiana
A1  - Petroni, Fabio
A1  - Scala, Antonio
A1  - Caldarelli, Guido
A1  - Stanley, H. Eugene
A1  - Quattrociocchi, Walter
PB  - National Academy of Sciences
JF  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
IS  - 3
Y1  - 2016///
VL  - 113
ER  -