https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00342-w
Regular Article
Measuring user engagement with low credibility media sources in a controversial online debate
1
Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
2
ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Received:
11
June
2021
Accepted:
25
April
2022
Published online:
16
May
2022
We quantify social media user engagement with low-credibility online news media sources using a simple and intuitive methodology, that we showcase with an empirical case study of the Twitter debate on immigration in Italy. By assigning the Twitter users an Untrustworthiness (U) score based on how frequently they engage with unreliable media outlets and cross-checking it with a qualitative political annotation of the communities, we show that such information consumption is not equally distributed across the Twitter users. Indeed, we identify clusters characterised by a very high presence of accounts that frequently share content from less reliable news sources. The users with high U are more keen to interact with bot-like accounts that tend to inject more unreliable content into the network and to retweet that content. Thus, our methodology applied to this real-world network provides evidence, in an easy and straightforward way, that there is strong interplay between accounts that display higher bot-like activity and users more focused on news from unreliable sources and that this influences the diffusion of this information across the network.
Key words: Misinformation / Disinformation / Information diffusion / Immigration / Online social networks
The original online version of this article was revised: the authors reported that the reference to [37] in the Discussion section should instead have referred to [35, 36]. Reference [37] was not appropriate in the context it was cited. The authors have amended the references for the corresponding argument to point to other articles instead. References [38] and [39] have been renumbered.
A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00352-8.
Copyright comment corrected publication 2022
© The Author(s) 2022. corrected publication 2022
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