Misinformation, Persuasion, and News Media on Social Networks

Social media platforms have become a popular source of news and information for a large segment of society. Users can receive information, share digital content, or attend to online publishers for the latest news. However, the recent proliferation of misinformation has affected people’s perception of the veracity of online information and, in turn, their social behavior. In this environment of real and false information, this dissertation studies two aspects of user behavior through the lens of persuasion: (1) sharing online news, and (2) consumer choice of news media. The first part focuses on the dissemination of online news on social media platforms such as Twitter. I propose two frameworks: in the first I focus on non-strategic agents and in the second one I proceed with a game-theoretic setting. In the first model, agents choose to share news based on whether it can move their followers’ beliefs closer to their own in the aggregate, and the current size of news spread, without considering news spreading in the future. I describe the dynamics of news spread arising from individual decisions and uncover the mechanisms that lead to a sharing cascade. I elucidate an association between the news precision levels that maximize the probability of a cascade and the wisdom of the crowd. The second model concerns a binary vote and rational agents who share news to make their followers cast the same vote as they do while strategically speculating on others’ sharing decisions and news spread at the steady state. I characterize the underlying news spread as an endogenous Susceptible-Infected (SI) epidemic process and derive agents’ sharing decisions and the size of the sharing cascade at the equilibrium of the game. I show that lower credibility news can result in a larger cascade than fully credible news provided that the network connectivity surpasses a connectivity limit. I further delineate the relationship between cascade size, network connectivity, and news credibility in terms of polarization and diversity in prior beliefs. The second part of this dissertation investigates how subscribers with diverse prior beliefs choose between two ideologically opposing news media (intermediaries) that are motivated to influence the public opinion, through their roles of news verification and selective disclosure. The news media may access some news about the state of the world, which may or may not be informative and they can choose whether to verify it. The news media then decide whether to disclose the news, aiming to persuade their subscribers to take the optimal action about the state based on their own beliefs. I show that centrists choose to subscribe to the intermediary with the opposing view, thereby exhibiting anti-homophily. By contrast, extremists exhibit homophily and prefer the intermediary with ideology that aligns with theirs. This dissertation contributes to the growing literature on people’s behavior of news consumption by offering game-theoretic frameworks built on a persuasion motive.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hsu, Chin-Chia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jadbabaie, Ali

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147492

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/147492