Prominent social media figures with large followings can become “superspreaders” disinformation, blasting falsehoods to potentially hundreds of millions of people. And there is clear evidence that some fake news stories do spread like a simple contagion, infecting users immediately. Recent studies have employed mathematical models to follow the diffusion of misinformation across social networks, drawing from the susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model, simulating the dynamics between susceptible (S), infected (I), and recovered or resistant individuals (R). Taking an epidemiological approach to the study of fake news allows us to predict its spread and model the effectiveness of interventions such as “prebunking” (an inoculation prior to infection, as opposed to “de-bunking” the more difficult task of backtracking someone’s belief.) Or, effectively: “psychological vaccination.”
