CNR ExploRA

Articolo in rivista, 2017, ENG, 10.1073/pnas.1617052114

Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook

Schmidt A.L.; Zollo F.; Vicario M.D.; Bessi A.; Scala A.; Caldarelli G.; Stanley H.E.; Quattrociocchi W.

Laboratory of Computational Social Science, Networks Department, IMT Alti Studi Lucca, Networks Dept, Lab Computat Social Sci, I-55100 Lucca, Italy. IUSS Inst Adv Study, I-27100 Pavia, Italy. CNR Uos Sapienza, ISC, I-00185 Rome, Italy. Boston Univ, Dept Phys, Boston, MA 02115 USA. Univ Venice, Dipartimento Sci Ambientali Informat & Stat DAIS, I-30172 Venice, Italy

The advent of social media and microblogging platforms has radically changed the way we consume information and form opinions. In this paper, we explore the anatomy of the information space on Facebook by characterizing on a global scale the news consumption patterns of 376 million users over a time span of 6 y (January 2010 to December 2015). We find that users tend to focus on a limited set of pages, producing a sharp community structure among news outlets. We also find that the preferences of users and news providers differ. By tracking how Facebook pages "like" each other and examining their geolocation, we find that news providers are more geographically confined than users. We devise a simple model of selective exposure that reproduces the observed connectivity patterns.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Online) 114 (12), pp. 3035–3039