Collaborative Research: HNDS-R: Polarization, Information Integrity, and Diffusion

The aim of this project is to deepen understanding of polarization as the vortex in which misleading statements go viral. The civic promise of social media was universal access to the knowledge needed to inform and motivate broad political engagement on controversial issues. Instead, social media have become the Petri dish for epistemic polarization – the division of the public into red and blue realities. The spread of polarizing unverifiable statements over social media erodes the shared knowledge needed for constructive disagreement and allows foreign adversaries to mount toxic communication campaigns with frightening virality. Through analysis of old and new social media data and development of new analytic methods, the research in this project brings a greater understanding of the diffusion dynamics of misleading statements. This will be useful in improving the trustworthiness of cyberspace. Using previously collected ten-year Twitter archive, along with new data to be collected, curated, and anonymized, in this project the impact of polarization on the dissemination of misleading statements in online networks is investigated. The new data set will be the largest publicly available data set of its kind, contributing to future research on this topic. In addition, analytical methods are developed to evaluate the ideological content, veracity of messages, alignment of users, and the structural and temporal characteristics of misleading statement cascades, such as reach, velocity, and virality. What results from this work is a deeper understanding of the diffusion dynamics of misleading statements. This can inform an early-containment counterstrategy that can more effectively identify, track, and neutralize diffusion before the contagion can spread out of control. This project is funded jointly by the Sociology Program, Human Networks and Data Science – Research (HNDS-R) Program, and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.