Debunking in a World of Tribes
This addresses the problem of misinformation spread on social media for policymakers and platform designers, but it is incremental as it confirms existing theories with large-scale data.
The study analyzed 54 million Facebook users over five years to assess the effectiveness of debunking posts in combating misinformation, finding that debunking is largely ineffective as it rarely reaches conspiracy users and often increases their engagement with unsubstantiated content.
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.