Gossip and the Information Cascade principle
Defined as the idle talk or rumor about the personal or private affairs of others. It is one of the oldest and best examples of an information cascade effect as seen in daily life. It starts from one person, having some sort of information rooted to reality, and spreads from there. The first person, with the actual information passes it on to some other person, who (either due to a partial understanding of the topic, or due to personal prejudices) makes a slight change in the information handed, but relates it pretty much as it is to the third person, who applies a similar formula to the piece of information and passes it on. The key principle here is that none of the people beyond the first one actually knows whether the piece of information is authentic or accurate in any way or not. By the time a 5th or 6th person is reached in this rumor mill, the rumor has reached a steady state of untruth/blind belief in the previous person’s version of it.
In this article, “How to Make and Spread Rumors”, the author writes about the science behind spreading rumors. He says that the types of people that spread rumors quickly are those that have the need to have the most information about events, or people with fears, hopes or hostilities about certain events. This applies well to the argument that people in that particular rumormongering chain, usually twist the rumor according to what they want the rumor to sound like, as opposed to what it actually consists of, based on their personal biases.
The British UPC was able to find such networks of people around the world, which would be optimally equipped to spread rumors. These networks were especially selected because they allowed for information to cascade through it as designed by the agency, and enable an end result that was slightly removed from the original rumor due to a little twisting along the way, but not necessarily anywhere near the truth, by a mile. This is obviously a desirable end result for the rumor mongers.
Source: http://danzarrella.com/rumors.html#