Consumers of Alternative News are More Likely to Fall for Troll Memes

Most of the online activism Facebook pages contain claims that mainstream media is manipulated by higher entities (and thus the information is be not neutral or reliable). Such an antagonism makes any kind of persuasion process, even if based on more solid information, very dicult. As a response to partisan debates, the emergent groups of trolls began to provide parodistic imitations of a wide range of online partisan topics. Despite the evident parodistic (and sometimes paradoxical) contents, not rarely, troll memes fomented animated debates and diused through the community as any other information would. Through statistical analysis, we nd that the consumption patterns are similar despite the dierent nature of the information. Finally, in order to uncover more characteristics of the process, we distinguished users with strong aliations and observed their respective interaction patterns, as well as with false information inoculated in that portion of the Facebook ecosystem. We nd that, out of the 1279 labeled users interacting with the troll memes, a dominant percentage (56% , as opposed to 26% and 18% for other groups) is constituted of users preeminently interacting with alternative information sources and thus more exposed to unsubstantiated claims. The results of our study raise a real warning, as the higher the number of circulating unsubstantiated claims is, the more users will be biased in selecting contents.

Memes that are satirical or paradoxical.