A growing concern is that as local newspapers disappear, communities lose trusted gatekeepers and develop information voids, creating openings for misinformation to thrive. Previous work has not evaluated whether residents of news deserts have developed different information acquisition habits. We fill this gap by directly comparing information consumption and referral patterns inside and outside of news deserts in a novel dataset of engagement with online media by millions of users on the Edge browser.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnti-vaccine content and other kinds of misinformation are hypothesized to be more heavily monetized than other kinds of online content. We test this hypothesis by applying several novel and scalable measures of website monetization strategies to more than 400,000 links shared by 261 anti-vaccine Facebook pages and 190 pro-vaccine ones. Contrary to expectations, websites promoted in pro-vaccine venues do more to monetize attention than those promoted in anti-vaccine venues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfluence, the ability to change the beliefs and behaviors of others, is the main currency on social media. Extant studies of influence on social media, however, are limited by publicly available data that record expressions (active engagement of users with content, such as likes and comments), but neglect impressions (exposure to content, such as views) and lack "ground truth" measures of influence. To overcome these limitations, we implemented a social media simulation using an original, web-based micro-blogging platform.
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