Science vs Conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Facebook users consume scientific and conspiracy narratives, revealing community formation, content focus differences, and reactions to troll information among 1.2 million users.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of online information consumption patterns around scientific and conspiracy narratives, highlighting community behaviors and responses to troll content.

Findings

Distinct communities form around different narratives.

Conspiracy news consumers are more focused on their content.

Conspiracy consumers are most prone to interact with troll information.

Abstract

The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called {\em wisdom of crowds}, unsubstantiated rumors -- as alternative explanation to main stream versions of complex phenomena -- find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. In this work we study, on a sample of 1.2 million of individuals, how information related to very distinct narratives -- i.e. main stream scientific and alternative news -- are consumed on Facebook. Through a thorough quantitative analysis, we show that distinct communities with similar information consumption patterns emerge around distinctive narratives. Moreover, consumers of alternative news (mainly conspiracy theories) result to be more focused on their contents, while scientific news consumers are more prone to comment on alternative news. We conclude our analysis testing the response of this social system to 4709 troll information -- i.e. parodistic imitation of alternative and conspiracy theories. We find that, despite the false and satirical vein of news, usual consumers of conspiracy news are the most prone to interact with them.