Trust and spread of gossip in soccial networks
This article at UIC Today, the University of Illinois Chicago news network, discusses a new study of the spread of gossip by Laura Schaposnik. His model introduces the idea that gossip spreads slower when people require to hear it from different types of people before they trust and spread it. As such, gossip propagates slower and reaches a smaller portion of people. For example, in social networks of 10000 people, if one requires to hear a rumor from any three people to spread it, it will propagate quickly and reach the whole social network. However, if a person requires to hear a rumor from 3 different types of people, e.g Republicans, Democrats, and independent, it will require 250 people initially who spread the rumor for it to reach half of the network.
This study relates to the ideas of information cascades and diffusion. In particular, a person spreads gossip if a certain number of people before them communicated this rumor. I also thought of this in relation to the coordination game with two choices for each person – to spread, or not to spread the rumor. Then you can think of trust value as a fraction of one node’s neighbors who spread the gossip for this node to spread the gossip further. However, the idea of trust requiring different types of people proposed by Schaposnik makes this model more complicated and interesting.