# Trend of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.05163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.05163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Understanding the Humans Behind Online Misinformation: An Observational Study Through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08483/) (2023)
- [Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26062/) (2026)
- [CommunityFact: A Dynamic, Multilingual, Multi-domain Benchmark for Misinformation Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a em disintermediation weakened consensus on social relevant issues in favor of rumors, mistrust, and fomented conspiracy thinking -- e.g., chem-trails inducing global warming, the link between vaccines and autism, or the New World Order conspiracy. In this work, we study through a thorough quantitative analysis how different conspiracy topics are consumed in the Italian Facebook. By means of a semi-automatic topic extraction strategy, we show that the most discussed contents semantically refer to four specific categories: em environment, em diet, em health, and em geopolitics. We find similar patterns by comparing users activity (likes and comments) on posts belonging to different semantic categories. However, if we focus on the lifetime -- i.e., the distance in time between the first and the last comment for each user -- we notice a remarkable difference within narratives -- e.g., users polarized on geopolitics are more persistent in commenting, whereas the less persistent are those focused on diet related topics. Finally, we model users mobility across various topics finding that the more a user is active, the more he is likely to join all topics. Once inside a conspiracy narrative users tend to embrace the overall corpus.