It is hard to kill fake news

Abstract

We study a model for the spread of fake news, where first a piece of fake news is spread from a location in a network, followed by a correction to the news. We assume that both the fake as well as correct news travel as first-passage percolations or SI epidemics with i.i.d.\ traversal times, possibly with different distributions and dependence. We make the (hopeful) assumption that once a vertex in the network hears the correct news, they are immediately convinced that this is indeed correct, and continue to spread the correct news. Even in this optimistic scenario, our main results show that it is very difficult to remove the fake news from the network, even when the correct news would spread much faster than the fake news. We show this on the configuration model, a model that has gained enormous popularity as a simple, yet flexible, model for real-world networks. The crux of the proof is the realization that this problem on a branching process tree (which is known to be the local limit of the configuration model) can be reformulated in terms of the maximum of a branching random walk, a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the past decade. We then extend the results to the graph setting using couplings to branching processes, local convergence and detailed estimates on first-passage percolation on random graphs as derived in \cite{BhaHofHoo17}. Remarkably, despite the fact that our proofs for the configuration model rely on its local branching process structure, the condition for strong survival on a finite number of generations of a branching process tree is {\em different} from that on the configuration model.