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      Misinformation and herd behavior in media markets: A cross-national investigation of how tabloids’ attention to misinformation drives broadsheets’ attention to misinformation in political and business journalism

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          Abstract

          This study develops and tests a theoretical framework, which draws on herd behavior literature and explains how and under what conditions tabloids’ attention to misinformation drives broadsheets’ attention to misinformation. More specifically, the study analyzes all cases of political and business misinformation in Switzerland and the U.K. between 2002 and 2018, which are selected based on corresponding Swiss and U.K. press councils’ rulings (N = 114). The findings show that during amplifying events (i.e., election campaigns and economic downturns) tabloids allocate more attention to political and business misinformation, which, in turn, drives broadsheets to allocate more attention to the misinformation as well–and especially if the misinformation serves broadsheets’ ideological goals. Moreover, the findings show differences between Swiss and U.K. media markets only in the case of business misinformation and suggest that the attention allocation process depends in particular on the strength of the amplifying event in a media market. Thereby, this study contributes to the understanding of how and under what conditions misinformation spreads in media markets.

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          A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades

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            Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

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              The spreading of misinformation online.

              The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15--where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., "echo chambers." Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades' size.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                11 November 2020
                2020
                : 15
                : 11
                : e0241389
                Affiliations
                [001]Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
                Beihang University, CHINA
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7945-8441
                Article
                PONE-D-20-11280
                10.1371/journal.pone.0241389
                7657564
                33175883
                5f4598f0-1a88-4961-8bc6-0b3a6205ece1
                © 2020 Bartosz Wilczek

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 19 April 2020
                : 13 October 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 8, Pages: 22
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001711, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung;
                Award ID: 100017_159548
                Award Recipient :
                Funding was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant-Nr.: 100017_159548). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Communications
                Mass Media
                Journalism
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                Elections
                People and Places
                Geographical Locations
                Europe
                Switzerland
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Social Systems
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Industrial Organization
                Structure of Markets
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                Europe
                European Union
                United Kingdom
                England
                Custom metadata
                Data are available at FORS: https://forsbase.unil.ch/project/study-public-overview/17063/0/. To access the data, users need to have a FORS account. Researchers can easily sign up in order to get access.

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