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Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online influences is therefore crucial to securing their assent for policies ranging from vaccinations, masks and social distancing against the pandemic, to household best practices against climate change, to acceptance of future 5G towers nearby. Here we show how a strengthening of bonds across online communities during the pandemic, has led to non-Covid-19 conspiracy theories (e.g. fluoride, chemtrails, 5G) attaining heightened access to mainstream parent communities. Alternative health communities act as the critical conduits between conspiracy theorists and parents, and make the narratives more palatable to the latter. We demonstrate experimentally that these inter-community bonds can perpetually generate new misinformation, irrespective of any changes in factual information. Our findings show explicitly why Facebooks current policies have failed to stop the mainstreaming of non-Covid-19 and Covid-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation, and why targeting the largest communities will not work. A simple yet exactly solvable and empirically grounded mathematical model, shows how modest tailoring of mainstream communities couplings could prevent them from tipping against establishment guidance. Our conclusions should also apply to other social media platforms and topics.
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The results of the public opinion poll performed in January 2015, just after the terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris, when 17 people were killed, showed that a significant number of French citizens held conspiratorial beliefs about it (17 %). This gave reason to an alternative analysis of public opinion, presented in this paper. We collected 990 on-line articles mentioning Charlie Hebdo from Le Monde web site (one of the leading French news agencies), and looked at the ones that contained words related with conspiracy (in French: `complot, `conspiration or `conjuration). Then we analyzed the readers response, performing a semantic analysis of the 16490 comments posted on-line as reaction to the above articles. We identified 2 attempts to launch a conspiratorial rumour. A more recent Le Monde article, which reflects on those early conspiratorial attempts from a rational perspective, and the commentary thereon, showed that the readers have more interest in understanding the possible causes for the onset of conspiratorial beliefs then to delve into the arguments that the conspiracists previously brought up to the public. We discuss the results of the above semantic analysis and give interpretation of the opinion dynamics measured in the data.
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus on the virus, its spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of property, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, and demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frameworks supporting the generation of these stories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling rumors and conspiracy theories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread.
In the face of serious infectious diseases, governments endeavour to implement containment measures such as public vaccination at a macroscopic level. Meanwhile, individuals tend to protect themselves by avoiding contacts with infections at a microscopic level. However, a comprehensive understanding of how such combined strategy influences epidemic dynamics is still lacking. We study a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic model with imperfect vaccination on dynamic contact networks, where the macroscopic intervention is represented by random vaccination of the population and the microscopic protection is characterised by susceptible individuals rewiring contacts from infective neighbours. In particular, the model is formulated both in populations without and then with demographic effects. Using the pairwise approximation and the probability generating function approach, we investigate both dynamics of the epidemic and the underlying network. For populations without demography, the emerging degree correlations, bistable states, and oscillations demonstrate the combined effects of the public vaccination program and individual protective behavior. Compared to either strategy in isolation, the combination of public vaccination and individual protection is more effective in preventing and controlling the spread of infectious diseases by increasing both the invasion threshold and the persistence threshold. For populations with additional demographic factors, the integration between vaccination intervention and individual rewiring may promote epidemic spreading due to the birth effect. Moreover, the degree distributions of both networks in the steady state is closely related to the degree distribution of newborns, which leads to uncorrelated connectivity. All the results demonstrate the importance of both local protection and global intervention, as well as the demographic effects.
A self-organization of efficient and robust networks is important for a future design of communication or transportation systems, however both characteristics are incompatible in many real networks. Recently, it has been found that the robustness of onion-like structure with positive degree-degree correlations is optimal against intentional attacks. We show that, by biologically inspired copying, an onion-like network emerges in the incremental growth with functions of proxy access and reinforced connectivity on a space. The proposed network consists of the backbone of tree-like structure by copyings and the periphery by adding shortcut links between low degree nodes to enhance the connectivity. It has the fine properties of the statistically self-averaging unlike the conventional duplication-divergence model, exponential-like degree distribution without overloaded hubs, strong robustness against both malicious attacks and random failures, and the efficiency with short paths counted by the number of hops as mediators and by the Euclidean distances. The adaptivity to heal over and to recover the performance of networking is also discussed for a change of environment in such disasters or battlefields on a geographical map. These properties will be useful for a resilient and scalable infrastructure of network systems even in emergent situations or poor environments.
We numerically investigate that optimal robust onion-like networks can emerge even with the constraint of surface growth in supposing a spatially embedded transportation or communication system. To be onion-like, moderately long links are necessary in the attachment through intermediations inspired from a social organization theory.
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