The Washington Post: a Study of IMT Researchers Demonstrates the Futility of Debunking Conspiracy Theories in Social Media

By Caitlin Dewey The Washington Post (Extract) ..."Walter Quattrociocchi - the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca - and a team of seven other researchers studied how two groups of U.S. Facebook users interacted with news on the site. One group was comprised of people who interact with reputable science pages. (Those are the ones who presumably have a level of news literacy.) The other group was made of people who like far-out conspiracy pages - anti-vaxxers, Illuminati-watchers, that kind of thing. They quickly came to two conclusions about the conspiracy and non-conspiracy groups. First off: They didn't overlap at all, which means the misinformed, as we'll politely call them, were unlikely to ever see the truth. And second, when the conspiracy group did encounter "debunking" information, it didn't change their mind. In fact, it just made them more resolute: After encountering a post that challenged a conspiracy theory, theorists tend to like and comment on pages about that theory even more."... *To read the full article, please check the link bellow.