Fig 1.
Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients between users’ actions on Facebook posts and the related YouTube videos.
Fig 2.
Consumption Patterns of Videos on Facebook and YouTube.
The empirical CCDFs, 1 − F(x), show the consumption patterns of videos supporting conflicting narratives—i.e. Science and Conspiracy—in terms of comments (A and C) and likes (B and D) on Facebook and YouTube.
Fig 3.
Polarization on Facebook and YouTube.
The PDFs of the polarization ρ show that the vast majority of users is polarized towards one of the two conflicting narratives—i.e. Science and Conspiracy—on both Facebook and YouTube.
Fig 4.
Commenting Activity of Polarized Users.
The empirical CCDFs, 1 − F(x), of the number of comments left by polarized users on Facebook and YouTube.
Fig 5.
Commenting Activity of Users Polarized towards Conflicting Narratives.
The empirical CCDFs, 1 − F(x), of the number of comments left by users polarized on scientific narratives and conspiracy theories on Facebook (A) and YouTube (B).
Table 1.
Mean and standard deviation (obtained averaging results of 103 iterations) of precision, recall, and accuracy of the classification task for users Polarized in Conspiracy, Not Polarized, Polarized in Science.
Fig 6.
Performance measures the classification task.
Precision, recall, and accuracy of the classification task for users Polarized in Conspiracy, Not Polarized, Polarized in Science on Facebook and YouTube as a function of n. On both online social networks, we find that the model’s performance measures monotonically increase as a function of n. Focusing on the accuracy, significant results (greater than 0.70) are obtained for low values of n.
Table 2.
Performance measures of classification.
Precision, recall, and accuracy of the classification task for users Polarized in Conspiracy, Not Polarized, Polarized in Science when YouTube users are used as training set to classify Facebook users (top table), and when Facebook users are used as training set to classify YouTube users (bottom table).
Table 3.
Breakdown of the dataset.
Table 4.
Conspiracy Pages.
Table 5.
Science Pages.
Table 6.
Debunking Pages.