The effects of trust and influence on the spreading of low and high quality information

Abstract In this work, we employ a minimal agent-based model to explore the mechanisms that regulate competition between memes that spread online. We investigate the case in which each piece of information has a quality, and the higher is the quality the higher are the chances of being transmitted. The model allows us to study the impact of influential nodes on the spreading behavior. We show that meme’s quality does not guarantee virility, but there is a strong correlation between the meme’s success and the influence of the agent who introduced it. When trust is incorporated into the model and the agents can decided whether or not to accept a meme, we show that both lifetime and popularity distributions have broad power-law tails indicating that only a few memes spread virally through the population reproducing perfectly the broad distributions obtained from empirical data.

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