Title: Public discourse and news consumption on online social media: A quantitative, cross-platform analysis of the Italian Referendum,
Abstract: The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors
on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led
researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental
evidence showed that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing
deliberately false claims while dissenting information is mainly ignored or
might even increase group polarization. It seems reasonable that, to address
misinformation problem properly, we have to understand the main determinants
behind content consumption and the emergence of narratives on online social
media. In this paper we address such a challenge by focusing on the discussion
around the Italian Constitutional Referendum by conducting a quantitative,
cross-platform analysis on both Facebook public pages and Twitter accounts. We
observe the spontaneous emergence of well-separated communities on both
platforms. Such a segregation is completely spontaneous, since no
categorization of contents was performed a priori. By exploring the dynamics
behind the discussion, we find that users tend to restrict their attention to a
specific set of Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. Finally, taking advantage of
automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis techniques, we are able to
identify the most controversial topics inside and across both platforms. We
measure the distance between how a certain topic is presented in the
posts/tweets and the related emotional response of users. Our results provide
interesting insights for the understanding of the evolution of the core
narratives behind different echo chambers and for the early detection of
massive viral phenomena around false claims.