From trust in news to disagreement: is misinformation more controversial?
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2024
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| _version_ | 1866910848732102656 |
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| author | Sardo, Donald Ruggiero Lo Brugnoli, Emanuele Ubaldi, Enrico Gravino, Pietro Loreto, Vittorio |
| author_facet | Sardo, Donald Ruggiero Lo Brugnoli, Emanuele Ubaldi, Enrico Gravino, Pietro Loreto, Vittorio |
| contents | The growing prevalence of fruitless disagreement threatens social cohesion and constructive public discourse. While polarised discussions often reflect distrust in the news, the link between disagreement and misinformation remains unclear. In this study, we used data from "Cartesio", an online experiment rating the trustworthiness of Italian news articles annotated for reliability by experts, to develop a disagreement metric that accounts for differences in mean trust values. Our findings show that while misinformation is rated as less trustworthy, it is not more controversial. Furthermore, disagreement correlates with increased commenting on Facebook. This suggests that combating misinformation alone may not reduce polarisation. Disagreement focuses more on the divergence of opinions, trust, and their effects on social cohesion. Our study lays the groundwork for unsupervised news analysis and highlights the need for platform design that promotes constructive interactions and reduces divisiveness. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_12053 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | From trust in news to disagreement: is misinformation more controversial? Sardo, Donald Ruggiero Lo Brugnoli, Emanuele Ubaldi, Enrico Gravino, Pietro Loreto, Vittorio Physics and Society The growing prevalence of fruitless disagreement threatens social cohesion and constructive public discourse. While polarised discussions often reflect distrust in the news, the link between disagreement and misinformation remains unclear. In this study, we used data from "Cartesio", an online experiment rating the trustworthiness of Italian news articles annotated for reliability by experts, to develop a disagreement metric that accounts for differences in mean trust values. Our findings show that while misinformation is rated as less trustworthy, it is not more controversial. Furthermore, disagreement correlates with increased commenting on Facebook. This suggests that combating misinformation alone may not reduce polarisation. Disagreement focuses more on the divergence of opinions, trust, and their effects on social cohesion. Our study lays the groundwork for unsupervised news analysis and highlights the need for platform design that promotes constructive interactions and reduces divisiveness. |
| title | From trust in news to disagreement: is misinformation more controversial? |
| topic | Physics and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12053 |