Spreading of competing information in a network

Abstract

We propose a simple approach to investigate the spreading of news in a network. In more detail, we consider two different versions of a single type of information, one of which is close to the essence of the information (and we call it good news), and another of which is somehow modified from some biased agent of the system (fake news, in our language). Good and fake news move around some agents, getting the original information and returning their own version of it to other agents of the network. Our main interest is to deduce the dynamics for such spreading, and to analyze if and under which conditions good news wins against fake news. The methodology is based on the use of ladder fermionic operators, which are quite efficient in modeling dispersion effects and interactions between the agents of the system.