Simulating Misinformation Diffusion on Social Media Through CoNVaI: A Textual- and Agent-Based Diffusion Model

Abstract

Misinformation has experienced increased online diffusion, leveraging strategies, such as emotional manipulation, to influence users' opinions. Efforts are underway to develop tools to mitigate its effects, such as misinformation propagation models used to simulate the diffusion of information. There are different approaches within these models, although, they show a significant limitation by disregarding the content of the information shared, crucial to the diffusion. We consider it the central aspect of modeling information dissemination. To this end, we focus on Agent-Based Modeling due to its suitability to simulate the complex interactions and heterogeneous behaviors observed on social media. We base our approach on a state-of-the-art Agent-Based Model that we modify and extend to account for the texts of the messages shared, focusing on two aspects that influence agents' decisions: i) the novelty of the content and; ii) its diffusion and behavior over time. To determine whether this content proves informative, we conduct an empirical evaluation using social media data from Twitter. Based on our experimental results, we observe that our textual-based approach reflects information diffusion more realistically than the state of the art, reducing the error regarding real diffusion.