Debunking in a world of tribes
Open accessAbstract
Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, in such a disintermediated environment misinformation is pervasive and attempts to debunk are often undertaken to contrast this trend. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of debunking on Facebook through a quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan 2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users usually consuming proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook US interact with specific debunking posts. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. However, both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. Then, we measure how users from both echo chambers interacted with 50,220 debunking posts accounting for both users consumption patterns and the sentiment expressed in their comments. Sentiment analysis reveals a dominant negativity in the comments to debunking posts. Furthermore, such posts remain mainly confined to the scientific echo chamber. Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.
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Attitude-based homophily is particularly pronounced in segregated networks, such as scientific vs. conspiracy communities, and among groups divided by political affiliation, such as Democrats and Republicans.
“This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in segregated networks, such as”
From A systematic review of echo chamber research: comparative analysis of conceptualizations, operationalizations, and varying outcomes (2025) · cites this paper as [50]
The Conclusions (page not provided) describe highly segregated Facebook communities centered on scientific and conspiracy topics, and the Echo chambers section reports that users are polarized toward one or the other. The paper does not address homophily between Democrats and Republicans, so the political-affiliation example is not supported by this source. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe amount of media a person consumes is anti-proportional to their chance of being trapped in an echo chamber, which contradicts findings by CSS studies that engagement and echo chambers are positively correlated.
“They find that the amount of media a person consumes is anti-proportional to their chance of being trapped in an echo chamber, which contradicts findings by CSS studies [48,50,66,67] that find that engagement and echo chambers are positively correlated.”
From A systematic review of echo chamber research: comparative analysis of conceptualizations, operationalizations, and varying outcomes (2025) · cites this paper as [50]
The Results and discussion section (‘Echo chambers’; page unavailable) finds that Facebook users are highly polarized and mainly interact with one type of content, supporting a link between engagement and echo chambers. It does not show that greater amounts of engagement are correlated with a greater likelihood of being in an echo chamber. The inverse relationship is attributed to a different study in the citing sentence, not to this source. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredFact-checks are unlikely to reach everyone who was exposed to the initial misinformation.
“fact-checks are unlikely to reach everyone who was exposed to the initial misinformation (10);”
From Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media (2022) · cites this paper as [10]
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Zollo, F., Bessi, A., Del Vicario, M., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., Shekhtman, L., Havlin, S., & Quattrociocchi, W.
- Affiliations
- IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (IT)
- Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori di Pavia (IT)
- Bar-Ilan University (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Zollo, Fabiana
- ORCID
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2017-07-24
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- e0181821
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5524392
- OpenAlex
- W2962740444
- Cited by
- 345
- References
- 51
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 39 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 53 · 2020: 55 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 6
- FWCI
- 85.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) (submittedVersion)
- ARCA (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- debunking, misinformation, conspiracy beliefs, echo chambers, Facebook, social media, user engagement, sentiment analysis, scientific information, disintermediation
- MeSH terms
- Attention, Communication, Humans, United States, Social Networking, Social Media
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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