One of the key limitations of studies of diffusion is public availability of data
across platforms. Most researchers therefore rely on Twitter data, overlooking
how misinformation is spread on the world’s largest social media site,
Facebook. Del Vicario et al. (2016) ﬁll part of this gap by scraping all posts
from sixty-seven public Facebook pages – about half devoted to conspiracy
theories and half to science news. Although more limited in scope, these data
can serve as a Facebook-based proxy for the explorations of high- and low-
quality information diffusion conducted elsewhere. For both science news and
conspiracy theory pages, diffusion was primarily driven by selective exposure.
In other words, users preferred one or the other, generating something
approaching separate echo chambers. However, while science news typically
reached a high level of diffusion quickly and tapered off, the opposite was true
for conspiracy theory content – this form of misinformation spread slowly but
Social_Media_and_Democracy