The Shape of Misinformation

Grinberg, Ethan

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/114211 Copy

Description

Title

The Shape of Misinformation

Author(s)

Grinberg, Ethan

Contributor(s)

Fisher, Jacob

Issue Date

2022

Keyword(s)

College of Media

Abstract

Having information at our fingertips should theoretically leave us more informed and knowledgeable, but it has left us more confused than ever. Social media's upheaval of our information ecosystem has been a catalyst for the proliferation of misinformation and what some scholars call a 'post-truth' society. The information age's contrast between expectation and reality has motivated me to wrestle with the problem of misinformation in my research. Specifically, I study how misinformation spreads on social media by analyzing diffusion networks, a graph where a node represents a user that posted an article and an edge represents a share or comment. This image shows the variety of shapes and sizes of Twitter diffusion networks for a set of misinformation articles. My goal with this project is to group similarly shaped diffusion networks together to identify patterns in how misinformation spreads on social media. With this project and future research, I hope to guide social media policy and algorithm design that leads to a more informed society.

Type of Resource

• Text
• Image

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/114211

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Ethan Grinberg

Owning Collections