12 January 2016
The IMT research team in the CSSLab (Laboratory of Computational Social Science), headed by Assistant Professor Walter Quattrociocchi, and their novel quantitative analyses of the dissemination of misinformation on the internet, continues to receive considerable local, national and international media attention, including from the Washington Post, the Daily Mail and Der Spiegel. The team 's latest success - and perhaps most important from an academic standpoint - is the very recent online publication of their article 'The spreading of misinformation online' in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The journal, which only accepts an average of 18% of submitted articles, has been one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials, known for its cutting-edge research reports since its establishment in 1914.
Quattrociocchi and his team 's findings show how confirmation bias fosters the formation of homogeneous clusters, or online 'echo-chambers', in which people reinforce their worldviews and essentially ignore the rest. In fact, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. The study introduces a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and shows that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades' size. This is a truly important milestone for computational social science and for interdisciplinarity. The Director of the IMT School, Prof. Pietro Pietrini, says that this elegant study fosters the School's mission to understand human behavior. Prominent Professor Cass Sunstein, who works on the psychological factors behind conspiracy, praises the research in an article on the Bloomberg view http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-08/how-facebook-makes-us-dumber.
To access the paper on the PNAS website, please follow the link below.