The impact of effective participation in stopping misinformation: an approach based on branching processes

Abstract

The emergence of research that focuses on understanding the spreading and impact of disinformation is increasing year after year. Most of the time, the purpose of those who start the spreading of intentionally false information that is designed to cause harm is to catalyze its fast transformation into misinformation, which is the false content shared by people who do not realize it is false or misleading. Our interest is in discussing the role of people who decide to adopt an active role in stopping the propagation of information when they realize that it is false. For this, we formulate two simple probabilistic models to compare misinformation spreading in possible scenarios for which there is a passive or an active environment of aware individuals. With aware individuals, we mean those individuals who realize that a piece of given information is false or misleading. In the passive environment, we assume that if one of an aware individual is exposed to the misinformation then he/she will not spread it. In the active environment, we assume that if one of an aware individual is exposed to the misinformation then he/she will not spread it, but also he/she will stop the propagation to other individuals from the individual who contacted him/her. We appeal to the theory of branching processes to analyze propagation in both scenarios, and we discuss the role and the impact of effective participation in stopping misinformation. We show that the propagation reduces drastically, provided we assume an active environment. We also obtain theoretical and computational results to measure such a reduction, which in turn depends on the proportion of aware individuals and the number of potential contacts of each individual, which is assumed to be random.