How fake news can turn against its spreader

Dorje C Brody and Tomooki Yuasa

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: When different information sources on a given topic are combined, they interact in a nontrivial manner for a rational receiver of these information sources. Suppose that there are two information sources, one is genuine and the other contains disinformation. It is shown that under the conditions that the signal-to-noise ratio of the genuine information source is sufficiently large, and that the noise terms in the two information sources are positively correlated, the effect of disinformation is reversed from its original intent. That is, the effect of disinformation on a receiver of both information sources, who is unaware of the existence of disinformation, is to generate an opposite interpretation. While the condition in which this phenomenon occurs cannot always be ensured, when it is satisfied, the effect provides an effective way of countering the impacts of disinformation.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0331608 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 31608&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0331608

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0331608

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().