Using questions on social media as a window on our collective curiosity.

Online media affect not only what we believe to be true or false, but also which questions we entertain, what we are curious or uncertain about. Such questions may, in turn, increase our vulnerability to disinformation: people more readily believe a lie if it answers a question they already had. This project will use the millions of questions posted on social media as a window onto our collective curiosity, to investigate, among other things, whether a surge in disinformation is preceded by changes in our curiosity.

Funded by NWO grant 406.XS.01.165.

Team

• Matthijs Westera (PI)
• Mark Alewijnse
• Fenna Berger

Output

• We will present our findings at Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN34), which will take place in Leiden!
• Our data collection, preprocessing and analysis code (work in progress) can already be found on github.