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Register a new userNews consumption and social media regulations policy
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Added by
Gabriele Etta
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Users online tend to consume information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, users get exposed to a massive amount of information about a new topic having a high level of uncertainty. In this paper, we analyze two social media that enforced opposite moderation methods, Twitter and Gab, to assess the interplay between news consumption and content regulation concerning COVID-19. We compare the two platforms on about three million pieces of content analyzing user interaction with respect to news articles. We first describe users consumption patterns on the two platforms focusing on the political leaning of news outlets. Finally, we characterize the echo chamber effect by modeling the dynamics of users interaction networks. Our results show that the presence of moderation pursued by Twitter produces a significant reduction of questionable content, with a consequent affiliation towards reliable sources in terms of engagement and comments. Conversely, the lack of clear regulation on Gab results in the tendency of the user to engage with both types of content, showing a slight preference for the questionable ones which may account for a dissing/endorsement behavior. Twitter users show segregation towards reliable content with a uniform narrative. Gab, instead, offers a more heterogeneous structure where users, independently of their leaning, follow people who are slightly polarized towards questionable news.
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Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the Web as a driver of polarization. In order to further our understanding of the factors behind online polarization, in the present work we collect and analyze Web browsing histories of tens of thousands of users alongside careful measurements of the time spent browsing various news sources. We show that online news consumption follows a polarized pattern, where users visits to news sources aligned with their own political leaning are substantially longer than their visits to other news sources. Next, we show that such preferences hold at the individual as well as the population level, as evidenced by the emergence of clear partisan communities of news domains from aggregated browsing patterns. Finally, we tackle the important question of the role of user choices in polarization. Are users simply following the links proffered by their Web environment, or do they exacerbate partisan polarization by intentionally pursuing like-minded news sources? To answer this question, we compare browsing patterns with the underlying hyperlink structure spanned by the considered news domains, finding strong evidence of polarization in partisan browsing habits beyond that which can be explained by the hyperlink structure of the Web.
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Most of the information operations involve users who may foster polarization and distrust toward science and mainstream journalism, without these users being conscious of their role. Gab is well known to be an extremist-friendly platform that performs little control on the posted content. Thus it represents an ideal benchmark for studying phenomena potentially related to polarization such as misinformation spreading. The combination of these factors may lead to hate as well as to episodes of harm in the real world. In this work we provide a characterization of the interaction patterns within Gab around the COVID-19 topic. To assess the spreading of different content type, we analyze consumption patterns based on both interaction type and source reliability. Overall we find that there are no strong statistical differences in the social response to questionable and reliable content, both following a power law distribution. However, questionable and reliable sources display structural and topical differences in the use of hashtags. The commenting behaviour of users in terms of both lifetime and sentiment reveals that questionable and reliable posts are perceived in the same manner. We can conclude that despite evident differences between questionable and reliable posts Gab users do not perform such a differentiation thus treating them as a whole. Our results provide insights toward the understanding of coordinated inauthentic behavior and on the early-warning of information operation.
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