"What Else Are They Talking About?": A Large-Scale Longitudinal Analysis of Misinformation Super-Spreader Communities on Facebook (ICA 2024)

Snurb — Tuesday 25 June 2024 20:54
Politics | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | ICA 2024 |

ICA 2024

“What Else Are They Talking About?”: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Analysis of Misinformation Super-Spreader Communities on Facebook

Daniel Angus, Stephen Harrington, Axel Bruns, Phoebe Matich, Nadia Jude, Edward Hurcombe, Ashwin Nagappa

  • 22 June 2024 – Paper presented by Daniel Angus and Axel Bruns at the ICA 2024 conference, Gold Coast

Presentation Slides

Abstract

This paper focusses on a computationally-assisted analysis of the broad topics of discussion in 954 Facebook pages and groups that are most strongly implicated, and highly visible, in the sharing of links to 2314 high-profile ‘fake news’ websites, between 2016 and 2022. Our approach allows us to, first, understand what else (beyond problematic content) users share in these spaces and, second, how a specific topic of interest may play a role in driving users to share mis- and disinformation.

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