New research indicates that there are remarkable similarities between the spread of misinformation on the internet and a nuclear fission reaction, which sees heavier elements break down into lighter elements, releasing copious amounts of energy in their wake. This understanding could help quell the spread of false information and ill-founded rumors online.
While misinformation has always existed as long as humans have communicated, thanks to the advent of social media, it has never been easier for misinformation and rumor to propagate globally, whether intentionally or through simple misunderstanding.
As the spread of the distortion of fact has increased in speed, the inclination of people to accurately assess facts and the time available to do so has declined, according to the World Economic Forum. This issue has been further compounded by a declining trust in mainstream media and an increasing reliance on the “echo chambers” provided by partisan sources and social media sites. Thus, it has become extremely easy for bad-faith actors to manipulate the truth to their own ends.
Modeling how misinformation spreads
One factor that is crucial to stemming the tide of misinformation and even pushing back against it is a better understanding of how it spreads. Researchers may have landed on a model that accurately describes the creation of misinformation, its swell, spread, and how it eventually dies down.
This development arrives from an unexpected source: the modeling of nuclear fission, the process that powers energy-generating nuclear planets, and the intimidating destructive power of nuclear weapons.
In a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances, the research team compare internet network rumors to the nuclear fission process to construct a propagation model. This isn’t the first attempt to find a natural analog for the spread of rumor, with prior mathematical models comparing the spread of misinformation to models of disease spread. In these infectious disease models, the rumors begin as microbes that are also contagious.
The difficulty with this type of modeling is it doesn’t account for how the actions of the “infected” misinformation receivers change after infection. That means those models could be too passive to accurately describe what happens when a real person receives misinformation on the internet.
“Infectious disease models may mostly view the spread of rumors as a passive process of receiving infection, thus ignoring the behavioral and psychological changes of people in the real world, as well as the impact of external events on the spread of rumors,” said Wenrong Zheng, paper author and Shandong Normal University researcher, in a statement from the AIP.
Rather than modeling the initial rumor as a microbe, this team replaced microbes with a particle called a neutron, usually found tied up in the atomic nucleus with protons. The receiver changes from an organism being infected with a disease to an atomic nucleus of the element uranium.
A chain reaction
Neutrons are responsible for kickstarting the fission process when they slam into an unstable nucleus and provide the energy needed to split it into smaller daughter nuclei. If these nuclei split, they launch out more neutrons that then strike further unstable nuclei, breaking them apart and causing a chain reaction.
In the team’s model, a person who is uninclined to spread misinformation is a stable nuclei that doesn’t split when hit by neutrons. However, the behavior of the unstable nuclei, the person more likely to spread misinformation, is crucial in this fission/misinformation comparison.
“When individuals encounter rumors, they are influenced by their personal interests and decide whether to spread or whether repeated exposure is needed before spreading,” Zheng explained. “Based on different considerations of uranium fission thresholds, individuals are divided into groups based on the influence of their own interest thresholds, fully considering individual behavior and differences, which is more in line with the reality.”
Drawing this comparison doesn’t just help to explain how misinformation propagates, but it could also help to develop a defense against the spread of misinformation for governments and other official bodies as well as for individuals.
“The extent of rumor propagation is closely related to the proportion of rational internet users,” said Zheng. “This reflects the importance of education: the higher the level of education, the easier it is to question rumors when receiving information that is difficult to distinguish between right and wrong.”
Because the team found that rumors initially spread on small scales, social media platforms could perform real-time monitoring of misinformation.
“When the possibility of rumors is detected, the government or official media should check the content of the rumors and make corrections so rational citizens can effectively inhibit the propagation of rumors,” Zheng concluded.
Reference: W. Zheng., F. Liu. Dari., Y. Sun., A rumor propagation model based on nuclear fission, AIP Advances, (2024). DOI: 10.1063/5.0217575
Feature image credit: Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
