Fake News Memes and Social Networks
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-news-goes-viral-mdash-heres-the-math/
Why do some Memes about fake news and conspiracy theories get shared millions of times- why do other memes get shared zero times?
Computer and Information Scientists at Indiana University Bloomington think their model has the answers. Dr. Filippo Menczer, Dr.Xiaoyan Qiu and others at Indiana University Bloomington believe their research demonstrates that these questions can be answered by just three factors: “the enormous amount of information out there; the limited amount of time and attention people can devote to scrolling through their news feeds and choosing what to share; and the structure of the underlying social networks.”
Dr.Menczer talks about if people are being manipulated or tricked:“You could assume that people do know the difference, and still the fake stuff would go viral, simply because of information overload.” The researchers also explain that if the simulation of the networks is assumed to be random- meaning the connections equally distributed throughout the network no memes get shared millions of times. However real-world social networks (like Twitter) have some users who have hundreds of thousands of connections (followers) and these users tend to tip the scale in favor of certain memes causing them to become viral.