Rumor spreading: A trigger for proliferation or fading away

Ahad Zehmakan , Serge Galam (1)

1 CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS)

The dynamics of rumor spreading is investigated using a model with three kinds of agents who are, respectively, the Seeds, the Agnostics, and the Others. While Seeds are the ones who start spreading the rumor being adamantly convinced of its truth, Agnostics reject any kind of rumor and do not believe in conspiracy theories. In between, the Others constitute the main part of the community. While Seeds are always Believers and Agnostics are always Indifferents, Others can switch between being Believer and Indifferent depending on who they are discussing with. The underlying driving dynamics is implemented via local updates of randomly formed groups of agents. In each group, an Other turns into a Believer as soon as m or more Believers are present in the group. However, since some Believers may lose interest in the rumor as time passes by, we add a flipping fixed rate 0

Keywords: Dynamics; Rumor spreading; Seeds; Agnostics

Domains: Methods and statistics

Ahad Zehmakan, Serge Galam. Rumor spreading: A trigger for proliferation or fading away. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 2020, 30 (7), pp. - . ⟨10.1063/5.0006984⟩. ⟨hal-02997361⟩