Do Twitter users change their behavior after exposure to misinformation? An in-depth analysis.

Area of Science:

• Computational Social Science
• Social Media Analysis
• Information Science

Background:

• Social media platforms are increasingly exploited for misinformation dissemination.
• Online misinformation impacts user beliefs and contributes to societal issues like polarization.
• Understanding misinformation's effect on individual user behavior is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how exposure to misinformation influences specific user behaviors on Twitter.
• To quantify changes in tweeting frequency, sentiment, word usage, and media sharing patterns.

Main Methods:

• Comparative analysis of Twitter user behavior before and after exposure to misinformation.
• Analysis of tweeting frequency, tweet sentiment, specific word categories, and shared media URL ratios.
• Language distance analysis to compare exposed and baseline user groups.

Main Results:

• Users exhibited statistically significant behavioral changes across several metrics post-exposure.
• Exposed users demonstrated pre-existing differences compared to baseline users.
• Behavioral changes varied based on user characteristics (e.g., political leaning, exposure level) and network size (follower counts).

Conclusions:

• Exposure to misinformation demonstrably alters user behavior on social media platforms.
• Pre-exposure differences suggest susceptibility to misinformation may be linked to existing user traits.
• Bot behavior concerning misinformation exposure appears similar to that of human users.