Homophily and polarization in the age of misinformation

The World Economic Forum listed massive digital misinformation as one of= the main threats for our society. The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors = may have serious consequences on public opinion such as in the case of rumo= rs about Ebola causing disruption to health-care workers. In this work we t= arget Facebook to characterize information consumption patterns of 1.2M Ita= lian users with respect to verified (science news) and unverified (conspira= cy news) contents. Through a thorough quantitative analysis we provide impo= rtant insights about the anatomy of the system across which misinformation = might spread. In particular, we show that users' engagement on verified (or= unverified) content correlates with the number of friends having similar c= onsumption patterns (homophily). Finally, we measure how this social system= responded to the injection of 4, 709 false information. We find that the f= requent (and selective) exposure to specific kind of content (polarization)= is a good proxy for the detection of homophile clusters where certain kind= of rumors are more likely to spread.