Measuring user engagement with low credibility media sources in a controversial online debate.

ABSTRACT: 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 co

SUBMITTER: Vilella S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9108351 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature