Abstract
By analyzing tweets sent before and after Twitter users’ first interactions with known low- or high-credibility information sources, we have observed that people who interacted with low-credibility information tended to be more hateful even before that interaction. Such people seemed to further increase their hatefulness only following particularly engaged interactions with low-credibility content. By demonstrating the importance of a person’s level of engagement with misinformation for understanding its impact, these results bridge the gap between studies that detected behavioral effects amongst believers of misinformation and research that instead either failed to detect such effects or concluded that misinformation largely affects small, predisposed audiences. Our analysis also reveals a stronger link between interaction with misinformation and change in what people discuss rather than how they write posts.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity with funding from the Knight Foundation and Cognizant. Additional support was given by the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems. The views and conclusions contained herein belong to the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies of the Knight Foundation, Cognizant, or the U.S. government.
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Bellutta, D., Uyheng, J., Carley, K.M. (2022). The Missing Link Between User Engagement and Misinformation’s Impact on Online Behavior. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Pyke, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13558. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_8
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