Echo chambers in the age of misinformation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how echo chambers form and operate on Facebook, comparing the spread of scientific versus conspiracy content, and introduces a model to simulate their cascade dynamics.

Contribution

It provides empirical analysis of content consumption patterns and cascade sizes in echo chambers, and proposes a data-driven percolation model to mimic their diffusion dynamics.

Findings

Similar consumption patterns for scientific and conspiracy content

Different cascade sizes between the two types of narratives

Homogeneity drives content diffusion within echo chambers

Abstract

The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric on the part of some that this process generates "collective intelligence", the WWW also allows the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that often elicite 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 the civil war in the US. We study how Facebook users consume information related to two different kinds of narrative: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, the sizes of the spreading cascades differ. Homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents, but each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. To mimic these dynamics, we introduce a data-driven percolation model on signed networks.