Fig 1.
Empirical complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of users’ activity (like, comment and share) for post grouped by page category. The distributions are indicating heavy–tailed consumption patterns for the various pages.
Fig 2.
Empirical complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), grouped by page category, of the temporal distance between the first and last comment to each post. The life time of posts in both categories is similar.
Table 1.
Correlation (Pearson coefficient) between couple of actions to each post in scientific and conspiracy news. Posts from conspiracy pages are more likely to be liked and shared by users, indicating a major commitment in the diffusion.
Fig 3.
The membership of 73 pages as a) identified by means of their self-description, b) by applying the multi-level modularity optimization algorithm, and c) by looking at the maximum modularity score. Community detection algorithms based on modularity are good discriminants for community partitioning.
Table 2.
Number of classified users for each category and their commenting activity on the category in which they are classified and on the opposite category. Users polarized on conspiracy pages tend to interact especially in their community both in terms of comments and likes. Users polarized in science are more active elsewhere.
Fig 4.
Consumption patterns of polarized users.
Empirical complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) for likes and comments of polarized users.
Fig 5.
Posts on which at least a member of each the two communities has commented. The number of posts is 7,751 (1,991 from scientific news and 5,760 from conspiracy news). Here we show the commenting activity in terms of polarized users on the two categories.
Fig 6.
Polarized users on false information.
Percentage of comments and likes on intentional false memes posted by a satirical page from polarized users of the two categories.
Table 3.
Breakdown of Facebook dataset.
The number of pages, posts, likes, comments, likers, and commenters for conspiracy and science news.
Fig 7.
Number of polarized users as a function of the thresholding value θ on the two categories.
Table 4.
List of Facebook pages diffusing main stream scientific news and their url.
Table 5.
List of Facebook pages diffusing conspiracy news and their url.