- 8
- April
- 2025
CREF promotes original and high-impact lines of research, based on physical methods, but with a strong interdisciplinary character and in relation to the main problems of the modern knowledge society.
The CREF was born with a dual soul: a research centre and a historical museum. Its aim is to preserve and disseminate the memory of Enrico Fermi and to promote the dissemination and communication of scientific culture.
Higher education and projects for young researchers
Title: Entropy-based detection of Twitter echo chambers
Authors: Manuel Pratelli (IMT Lucca) Fabio Saracco (CREF, IMT, CNR) , Marinella Petrocchi (Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR)
Abstract:
Echo chambers, i.e. clusters of users exposed to news and opinions in line with their previous beliefs, were observed in many online debates on social platforms. We propose a completely unbiased entropy-based method for detecting echo chambers. The method is completely agnostic to the nature of the data. In the Italian Twitter debate about the Covid-19 vaccination, we find a limited presence of users in echo chambers (about 0.35% of all users). Nevertheless, their impact on the formation of a common discourse is strong, as users in echo chambers are responsible for nearly a third of the retweets in the original dataset. Moreover, in the case study observed, echo chambers appear to be a receptacle for disinformative content.
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