Measuring user engagement with low credibility media sources in a controversial online debate

We quantify social media user engagement with low-credibility online news media sources using a simple and intuitive methodology, that we showcase with an empirical case study of the Twitter debate on immigration in Italy. By assigning the Twitter users an Untrustworthiness ( U ) score based on how frequently they engage with unreliable media outlets and cross-checking it with a qualitative political annotation of the communities, we show that such information consumption is not equally distributed across the Twitter users. Indeed, we identify clusters characterised by a very high presence of accounts that frequently share content from less reliable news sources. The users with high U are more keen to interact with bot-like accounts that tend to inject more unreliable content into the network and to retweet that content. Thus, our methodology applied to this real-world network provides evidence, in an easy and straightforward way, that there is strong interplay between accounts that display higher bot-like activity and users more focused on news from unreliable sources and that this influences the diffusion of this information across the network.