arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 2006.00765cs.SIphysics.soc-ph
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阴谋与科学:在线讨论级联的大规模分析

Conspiracy vs science: A large-scale analysis of online discussion cascades

Yafei Zhang, Lin Wang, Jonathan J. H. Zhu, Xiaofan Wang

摘要:

随着社交媒体平台和社交网站的出现和迅速扩散,近年来我们的日常生活中出现了大量错误信息。我们利用涵盖超过140万条帖子和1800万条评论的大规模数据集,调查了两种不同叙述的传播--(i)阴谋信息,其说法通常未经证实,因此在某种程度上被称为错误信息,以及(ii)科学信息,其来源通常很容易识别和验证--在在线社交媒体平台上。我们发现,阴谋级联往往在多代分支过程中传播,而科学级联更有可能以广度优先的方式增长。具体来说,阴谋信息会引发更大的级联,涉及更多的用户和世代,持续时间更长,比科学信息更具病毒性和突发性。内容分析表明,阴谋级联包含更多的负面词汇和情感词汇,表达愤怒,恐惧,厌恶,惊讶和信任。我们还发现,阴谋级联更关注政治和有争议的话题。在应用机器学习模型后,我们在区分阴谋和科学叙述方面的AUC得分接近90%。我们发现,阴谋级联比科学级联更有可能被更广泛的用户控制,这给错误信息的管理带来了新的挑战。虽然政治亲和力被认为会影响错误信息的消费,但很少有证据表明信息源的政治取向在阴谋信息的传播过程中发挥作用。我们的研究为当前的错误信息研究提供了补充证据,并对阻止传播和减轻网上错误信息的影响具有实际的政策意义。

英文摘要:

With the emergence and rapid proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites, recent years have witnessed a surge of misinformation spreading in our daily life. Drawing on a large-scale dataset which covers more than 1.4M posts and 18M comments, we investigate the propagation of two distinct narratives--(i) conspiracy information, whose claims are generally unsubstantiated and thus referred as misinformation to some extent, and (ii) scientific information, whose origins are generally readily identifiable and verifiable--in an online social media platform. We find that conspiracy cascades tend to propagate in a multigenerational branching process while science cascades are more likely to grow in a breadth-first manner. Specifically, conspiracy information triggers larger cascades, involves more users and generations, persists longer, is more viral and bursty than science information. Content analysis reveals that conspiracy cascades contain more negative words and emotional words which convey anger, fear, disgust, surprise and trust. We also find that conspiracy cascades are more concerned with political and controversial topics. After applying machine learning models, we achieve an AUC score of nearly 90% in discriminating conspiracy from science narratives. We find that conspiracy cascades are more likely to be controlled by a broader set of users than science cascades, imposing new challenges on the management of misinformation. Although political affinity is thought to affect the consumption of misinformation, there is very little evidence that political orientation of the information source plays a role during the propagation of conspiracy information. Our study provides complementing evidence to current misinformation research and has practical policy implications to stem the propagation and mitigate the influence of misinformation online.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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