Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Rumors inundate every social network. Some of them aretrue, but many of them are false. On rare occasions, a falserumor is exposed as the lie that it is. But more commonly,false rumors have a habit of obtaining apparent verification,by corroboration from what seems to be a second independentsource. However, in complex social networks, theconnectivity is such that a putative second source is almostnever actually independent of the original source. In thepresent work, rumor network simulations demonstrate howremarkably easy it is for a node in the network to be fooledinto thinking it has received independent verification of afalse rumor, when in fact that “second source” can be tracedback to the original source. By developing a theoreticalunderstanding of the circumstances under which the spread offalse rumors, “alternative facts,” and fake news can becontrolled, perhaps the field can help prevent them fromruining elections and ruining entire nations.