Social determinants of content selection in the age of (mis)information

Abstract. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called collec-tive intelligence, conspiracy theories – e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism – find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. Users preferentially consume in-formation according to their system of beliefs and the strife within users of opposite narratives may result in heated debates. In this work we pro-vide a genuine example of information consumption from a sample of 1.2 million of Facebook Italian users. We show by means of a thorough quan-titative analysis that information supporting different worldviews – i.e. scientific and conspiracist news – are consumed in a comparable way by their respective users. Moreover, we measure the effect of the exposure to 4709 evidently false information (satirical version of conspiracy theses) and to 4502 debunking memes (information aiming at contrasting un-substantiated rumors) of the most polarized users of conspiracy claims. We find that either contrasting or teasing consumers of conspiracy nar-ratives increases their probability to interact again with unsubstantiated rumors