Opinion Dynamic Modeling of Fake News Perception

Fake news diffusion represents one of the most pressing issues of our online society. In recent years, fake news has been analyzed from several points of view, primarily to improve our ability to separate them from the legit ones as well as identify their sources. Among such vast literature, a rarely discussed theme is likely to play uttermost importance in our understanding of such a controversial phenomenon: the analysis of fake news’ perception. In this work, we approach such a problem by proposing a family of opinion dynamic models tailored to study how specific social interaction patterns concur to the acceptance, or refusal, of fake news by a population of interacting individuals. To discuss the peculiarities of the proposed models, we tested them on several synthetic network topologies, thus underlying when/how they affect the stable states reached by the performed simulations