digital media | Alberto Acerbi

digital media

Negativity bias in the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theory tweets during the 2020 US election

During the 2020 US presidential election, conspiracy theories about large-scale voter fraud were widely circulated on social media platforms. Given their scale, persistence, and impact, it is critically important to understand the mechanisms that …

Sentiment analysis of the Twitter response to Netflix's Our Planet documentary

The role of nature documentaries in shaping public attitudes and behaviour towards conservation and wildlife issues is unclear. We analysed the emotional content of over two million tweets related to *Our Planet*, a major nature documentary released …

Digital Culture

The diffusion of digital technologies triggered a radical departure from previous modalities of cultural transmission but, at the same time, general characteristics of human cultural evolution and cognition influence these developments. This chapter …

People believe misinformation is a threat because they assume others are gullible

Alarmist narratives about the flow of misinformation and its negative consequences have gained traction in recent years. If these fears are to some extent warranted, the scientific literature suggests that many of them are exaggerated. Why are overly …

Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research questioning the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six …

Why too much focus on online misinformation is a problem

Can't you just stop annoying them? They have good intentions!

From storytelling to Facebook

Some content spreads better in social media, but how can we know if it is *because* of social media?

From storytelling to Facebook. Content biases when retelling or sharing a story

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, where individuals need to …

Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information?

A wealth of interventions have been devised to reduce belief in fake news or the tendency to share such news. By contrast, interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources have received less attention. In this article, we show that, …

Cultural Accumulation and Improvement in Online Fan Fiction

We analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing …