Researchers have come up with a computer model that mirrors the way misinformation spreads in real life. The work might provide insight on how to protect people from the current contagion of misinformation that threatens public health and the health of democracy.

No, it’s not a virus. It’s the contagious spread of misinformation and disinformation — misinformation that’s fully intended to deceive.

Now Tufts University researchers have come up with a computer model that remarkably mirrors the way misinformation spreads in real life. The work might provide insight on how to protect people from the current contagion of misinformation that threatens public health and the health of democracy, the researchers say.

«Our society has been grappling with widespread beliefs in conspiracies, increasing political polarization, and distrust in scientific findings,» said Nicholas Rabb, a Ph.D. computer science student at Tufts School of Engineering and lead author of the study, which came out January 7 in the journal PLOS ONE. «This model could help us get a handle on how misinformation and conspiracy theories are spread, to help come up with strategies to counter them.»

Scientists who study the dissemination of information often take a page from epidemiologists, modeling the spread of false beliefs on how a disease spreads through a social network. Most of those models, however, treat the people in the networks as all equally taking in any new belief passed on to them by contacts.

The Tufts researchers instead based their model on the notion that our pre-existing beliefs can strongly influence whether we accept new information. Many people reject factual information supported by evidence if it takes them too far from what they already believe. Health-care workers have commented on the strength of this effect, observing that some patients dying from COVID cling to the belief that COVID does not exist.

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Materials provided by Tufts University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.