To understand why internet users spread fake news online, many studies have focused on individual drivers, such as cognitive skills, media literacy, or demographics. Recent findings have also shown the role of complex socio-political dynamics, highlighting that political polarisation and ideologies are closely linked to a propensity to participate in the dissemination of fake news. Most of the existing empirical studies have focused on the US example by exploiting the self-reported or solicited positioning of users on a dichotomous scale opposing liberals with conservatives. Yet, left-right polarisation alone is insufficient to study socio-political dynamics when considering non-binary and multi-dimensional party systems, in which relevant ideological stances must be characterized in additional dimensions, relating for example to opposition to elites, government, political parties or mainstream media. In this study we leverage ideological embeddings of Twitter networks in France in multi-dimensional opinions spaces, where dimensions stand for attitudes towards different issues, and we trace the positions of users who shared articles that were rated as misinformation by fact-checkers. This allows us to understand the relation between different types of polarisation, the opinion configuration of large online social systems, and their connection with the spread of misinformation online.
Schedule of events:
- Tuesday 23 May, Bocconi University
- Wednesday 24 May, Hertie School
- Friday 26 May, SNSPA
Speaker: Pedro Ramaciotti Morales (PhD in Applied Mathematics at École Polytechnique, France).
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CIVICA research, Bocconi University, Hertie School, SNSPA