Misinformation cascades: susceptibility to misinformation and how it spreads through social networks
The article linked below discusses the threat of misinformation to society, why certain people are more susceptible to its spread, and how it cascades through society. “Infodemics” are described as the overabundant spread of misleading and false information. This misinformation spread has clear links to harmful effects on public health, especially during pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic allowed for much research proving the association between misinformation about the disease and the likelihood of individuals to disregard public health guidance, thus causing lower vaccination rates and less societal protection against the deathly illness. Today’s hugely interconnected world through online sources and social media has allowed for extremely high rates of misinformation travel, and the article compares this spread to that of a viral pathogen, describing “secondary cases” of individuals who post and spread fake news due to contact with an “infectious individual” (the starter of misinformation). It discusses that susceptibility to misinformation is linked to how often a claim is repeated and that prior knowledge (the thoughts an individual himself possesses) does not necessarily protect people from adopting deceiving information he receives through other sources.
This concept relates directly to the information cascades discussed in class; we have proven through conditional probability that people may disregard their own information they receive (which in class we compared to receiving a high or low signal and choosing to accept or reject based on their guess of whether the state is G or B, respectively, given their signal and the choices of the people before them) if the people before them made different decisions. In question 4a of homework 6, we found that only the first and second person to receive signals are influenced by the signal they receive themselves, and that the third person will disregard his own information if both of the people before him chose something contrary to the signal he received. For example, if person 1 received a low signal he will reject, and person 2 will also reject given he received a low signal, but person 3 will reject even if he receives a high signal, because he assumes that the majority of signals received among the 3 people are low. This leads all the people after him to also reject, no matter the signal they receive themselves, and thus an information cascade forms in which everyone will continue to choose to reject based on the choices of the people before them. This possibly could lead to an incorrect information cascade, in which the state is actually G even though everyone chose to reject.
This is comparable to the spread of misinformation, because the more a claim is repeated (or in the case of the homework, the more people before you that choose to reject), the greater the probability is that you are susceptible to adopting false information (in the case of the homework, the greater the probability is that you will choose to reject even if the state is G). Additionally, people may ignore their own possessed knowledge about a topic (in the case of the homework, the signal they receive) if enough people before them are claiming something else (in the case of the homework, the prior people’s choice to reject). As stated in the article, possessing this prior knowledge about a concept does not protect people from adopting misinformation necessarily. In other words, fake news spreads through an information cascade in which people are falsely led to believe a concept is true (for example, as discussed in an article, that vaccines cause autism), even when they previously believed vaccines were important to their health and to herd immunity, when they hear information about the dangers of vaccines through other sources. Then, those people that adopted the false information will continue to spread that misinformation and other people will adopt that belief. An information cascade is formed, and in the case that it is fake news being spread, a cascade of misinformation. Through these information cascades, people are falsely led to believe that a piece of fake news is actually true because people before them are claiming that it’s true. These “infodemics” can cause society great harm, as they have during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01713-6