WASHINGTON, July 30, 2024 – It’s easier than ever to spread false or misleading information online. The anonymous and impersonal nature of the internet, combined with advanced tools like artificial intelligence, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate the truth and difficult for everyone to distinguish fact from fiction. In today’s climate of misinformation, understanding how lies and rumors spread is critical to combating them.
In AIP Advances, published by AIP Publishing, researchers from Shandong Normal University developed a new type of rumor propagation model, inspired by nuclear reactions. Their model can provide new insights into how online disinformation spreads and how to combat it.
Mathematical models can simulate the spread of rumors and inform approaches to counter them. They are typically adapted from epidemic models, in which rumors replace microbes because they are just as contagious. While broadly useful, existing models fail to capture the full picture of how misinformation spreads.
“Infectious disease models may mainly regard the spread of rumors as a passive process of receiving an infection, thus ignoring the behavioral and psychological changes of people in the real world, as well as the impact of external events on the spread of rumors,” said author Wenrong Zheng.
In contrast, the team identified similarities between rumor spreading and fission, the reaction that occurs inside nuclear reactors. In their model, rumors act like neutrons, the tiny particles that trigger nuclear fission. These rumors are perceived by individuals, who send them hurtling toward other people in a chain reaction.
“When individuals encounter rumors, they are influenced by their personal interests and decide to spread them or expose them several times before spreading them,” Zheng said. “Based on different considerations of uranium fission thresholds, individuals are divided into groups according to the influence of their own interest thresholds, taking full account of behavior and individual differences, which is more in line with reality.”
This new perspective on the spread of rumors may offer insight into how rumors tend to spread and what individuals can do to mitigate them.
“The extent of rumors spreading is closely related to the proportion of rational Internet users,” Zheng said. “This reflects the importance of education: the higher the education level, the easier it is to question rumors when receiving information that is difficult to distinguish between true and false.”
This approach can also help guide governments and media experts seeking to combat disinformation.
“We found that rumors spread on a small scale at the initial stage, so official platforms should conduct real-time monitoring. When the possibility of rumors is detected, the government or official media should verify the content of the rumors and make corrections so that rational citizens can effectively inhibit the spread of rumors.”
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