DISHONEST: Dissecting misInformation Spread using Homogeneous sOcial NEtworks and Semantic Topic classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Stam, Caleb, Saldanha, Emily, Halappanavar, Mahantesh, Acharya, Anurag
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Stam, Caleb
Saldanha, Emily
Halappanavar, Mahantesh
Acharya, Anurag
author_facet Stam, Caleb
Saldanha, Emily
Halappanavar, Mahantesh
Acharya, Anurag
contents The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant rise in the spread of misinformation on online platforms such as Twitter. Oftentimes this growth is blamed on the idea of the "echo chamber." However, the behavior said to characterize these echo chambers exists in two dimensions. The first is in a user's social interactions, where they are said to stick with the same clique of like-minded users. The second is in the content of their posts, where they are said to repeatedly espouse homogeneous ideas. In this study, we link the two by using Twitter's network of retweets to study social interactions and topic modeling to study tweet content. In order to measure the diversity of a user's interactions over time, we develop a novel metric to track the speed at which they travel through the social network. The application of these analysis methods to misinformation-focused data from the pandemic demonstrates correlation between social behavior and tweet content. We believe this correlation supports the common intuition about how antisocial users behave, and further suggests that it holds even in subcommunities already rife with misinformation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_09578
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DISHONEST: Dissecting misInformation Spread using Homogeneous sOcial NEtworks and Semantic Topic classification
Stam, Caleb
Saldanha, Emily
Halappanavar, Mahantesh
Acharya, Anurag
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant rise in the spread of misinformation on online platforms such as Twitter. Oftentimes this growth is blamed on the idea of the "echo chamber." However, the behavior said to characterize these echo chambers exists in two dimensions. The first is in a user's social interactions, where they are said to stick with the same clique of like-minded users. The second is in the content of their posts, where they are said to repeatedly espouse homogeneous ideas. In this study, we link the two by using Twitter's network of retweets to study social interactions and topic modeling to study tweet content. In order to measure the diversity of a user's interactions over time, we develop a novel metric to track the speed at which they travel through the social network. The application of these analysis methods to misinformation-focused data from the pandemic demonstrates correlation between social behavior and tweet content. We believe this correlation supports the common intuition about how antisocial users behave, and further suggests that it holds even in subcommunities already rife with misinformation.
title DISHONEST: Dissecting misInformation Spread using Homogeneous sOcial NEtworks and Semantic Topic classification
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09578