What is it about?
Ahead of elections in the U.S. and worldwide, we provide the missing science for how misinformation/disinformation and other harmful material (hate, extremism) spread online. And what needs to be done to combat them. Its show that policymakers must account for multi-community dynamics when shaping policies against system-wide spreading.
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Why is it important?
Until this paper, regulators, platforms and governments have had to guess how online harms spread and how to combat them -- with understandably poor results. This new science shows that multi-community dynamics are the missing silver bullet to shaping policies against spreading at scale.
Perspectives
Like many people, I hear endless Congressional hearings, EU laws, complaints against platforms etc. about online harms spreading. They go round in circles: "Facebook should do more" to which Facebook reply "We are doing more". We set out to find out what the truth is. The answer suggests that everyone has been looking in the wrong place.
Neil Johnson
George Washington University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nonlinear spreading behavior across multi-platform social media universe, Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, April 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0199655.
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