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Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than vaccination show that access to a wide amount of content through the Internet without intermediaries resolved into major segregation of the users in polarized groups. Users select the information adhering to theirs system of beliefs and tend to ignore dissenting information. In this paper we assess whether there is polarization in Social Media use in the field of vaccination. We perform a thorough quantitative analysis on Facebook analyzing 2.6M users interacting with 298.018 posts over a time span of seven years and 5 months. We used community detection algorithms to automatically detect the emergent communities from the users activity and to quantify the cohesiveness over time of the communities. Our findings show that content consumption about vaccines is dominated by the echo-chamber effect and that polarization increased over years. Communities emerge from the users consumption habits, i.e. the majority of users only consumes information in favor or against vaccines, not both. The existence of echo-chambers may explain why social-media campaigns providing accurate information may have limited reach, may be effective only in sub-groups and might even foment further polarization of opinions. The introduction of dissenting information into a sub-group is disregarded and can have a backfire effect, further reinforcing the existing opinions within the sub-group.
Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play a pivotal
On social media algorithms for content promotion, accounting for users preferences, might limit the exposure to unsolicited contents. In this work, we study how the same contents (videos) are consumed on different platforms -- i.e. Facebook and YouTu
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around shared narrati
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized clusters whe
This article analyses public debate on Twitter via network representations of retweets and replies. We argue that tweets observable on Twitter have both a direct and mediated effect on the perception of public opinion. Through the interplay of the tw