Spread and Control of Misinformation with Heterogeneous Agents

We consider an agent-based model to explore the mechanism behind the diffusion of low- and high-quality information in online social networks. In particular, we investigate how agents with heterogeneous criteria of quality affect the spread of low-quality information. We also propose a simple method for enhancing the spread of high-quality information without hindering the system’s information diversity. Our results show that the proposed solution mitigates the influence of malicious agents on the overall system’s quality, and also show how it controls low-quality information in the presence of agents with heterogeneous criteria of information’s quality assessment.