Debunking in a World of Tribes

TL;DR

This study analyzes the effectiveness of debunking misinformation on social media, revealing that most users remain in echo chambers and that debunking efforts often fail or reinforce conspiracy beliefs.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of user interactions with scientific and conspiracy information, highlighting the limited impact of debunking on entrenched echo chambers.

Findings

Debunking posts have limited reach among conspiracy followers.

Users tend to reinforce their beliefs after encountering debunking content.

Echo chambers persist with users mainly engaging within their preferred information bubbles.

Abstract

Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the wide availability of user-provided content and the direct path between producers and consumers of information often foster confusion about causations, encouraging mistrust, rumors, and even conspiracy thinking. In order to contrast such a trend attempts to \textit{debunk} are often undertaken. Here, we examine the effectiveness of debunking through a quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan 2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users interact with proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook in the US. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. Both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. We examine 47,780 debunking posts and find that attempts at debunking are largely ineffective. For one, only a small fraction of usual consumers of unsubstantiated information interact with the posts. Furthermore, we show that those few are often the most committed conspiracy users and rather than internalizing debunking information, they often react to it negatively. Indeed, after interacting with debunking posts, users retain, or even increase, their engagement within the conspiracy echo chamber.