Network analysis

Goal X.

Understand how prevalent misinformation spreading is, and who are the super-spreaders by understanding the relationships between submissions, comments, and specific users.

To begin this analysis, we visualized the network between authors and known sources of misinformation using a network graph. This graph highlights that most people that spread misinformation or comment on posts including it are only associated with one source of it. A much smaller number of authors post content from multiple misinformation sources. We can also see that some sources of misinformation are much more popular than others: more authors are associated with wattsupwiththat.com and notrickszone.com than the other websites. One such author is a user called AutoModerator, presumably a bot, which is associated with almost all of the known skeptic sites - this is likely indicative that these are known sources of misinformation that a bot could be used to identify. Users with names less indicative of a bot are also associated with multiple sources of misinformation, eg: Mindful-O-Melancholy, who is associated with five of the known sources.

When we create a network graph to indicate relationships between authors and posts containing climate misinformation, we can see that for all the posts associated with climate misinformation, only a few have generated significant traffic, and a single author (logicalprogressive) is associated with the bulk of the climate skeptic posts. This author has submissions across both the climateskeptics and the conspiracy subreddits, and was previously identified as a source of misinformation. We can also see that comment authors like disco-peanut have numerous authors with whom they share threads, most of which are also associated with logicalprogressive’s posts. We can also see here that submission authors especially logicalprogressive and LackmustestTester are also comment on their own submissions, and are probably active participants of debates they start.

When we instead plot the network of authors connected to specific climate denial claims, as identified by RoBERTa, we find that certain claims are much more prominent than others - many authors assert that climate change is the result of “natural cycles”, or that there is “no evidence for GHG warming effect”.