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Comment by intended

3 months ago

Ooh my kind of paper.

Also an older paper that I was introduced to, that exposed me to the concept of cascades sizes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113

And they went into it too:

> xtending the analysis to 50,220 fact-checking posts from dedicated debunking pages, Zollo et al. [288] find that corrective information remains almost entirely confined to the scientific echo chamber: approximately two-thirds of likes on debunk-ing posts come from science-oriented users, and only a small fraction of conspiracy-oriented users engage with such content. Sentiment analysis of comments, based on a supervised clas- sification model, reveals that responses to debunking posts are predominantly negative, regardless of the commenter’s orienta-tion. Strikingly, the rare conspiracy users who do interact with debunking tend to increase their subsequent activity within the conspiracy echo chamber, suggesting that exposure to dissent-ing information can reinforce rather than attenuate prior beliefs. Otherwise stated, results indicate that the spread of misinfor-mation online is less a problem of information scarcity than of entrenched structural and cognitive segregation, where homo-geneity and polarization govern the dynamics of both the diffu-sion of false narratives and the reception of their correction.

Use this the next time someone promises that online conversations naturally tend towards insight.