*** Why disinformation needs to be stopped BEFORE it spreads! ***
Let's be super clear about why you need to stop disinformation *before* it is widely amplified. Every study looking at this that I've seen shows clearly that misinformation and disinformation -- usually by virtue of their alarmist natures -- have vastly greater reach than any attempts to correct the falsehoods after the fact.
Efforts to use accurate information to "answer" misinformation and purposeful lies are either disbelieved, ignored, and shared to a dramatically lessor extent. Meanwhile, the liars and conspiracy promoters move on to their next topics, and their next victims.
Do you know of anyone trying to study how the mechanisms used to spread information affect that?
I would be curious (and have no predictions) whether the situation is worse in traditional gossip networks, or social-media-style networks (where you see pieces of information published by people you don't know without anyone being an intermediary). I would also expect that we've had systems that were somewhat better at it (e.g. I would guess that late 19th/early 20th century system spreading scientific discoveries was better, even though it had many failures).
(The main reason I'm curious is that I would be very happy if we had a way of making false information not harmful without relying on an authoritative source of truth, so that the same mechanisms would work if no such source is assumed to exist.)
@lauren The studies I can quickly find tend to look at a single social network and compare things (e.g. how different kinds of news spread) in that single network.
There are things like https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0833-x, which try to compare the same pieces of news spreading via various online social networks, or https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2102141118 that try to show how some properties of the network matter by examining toy models that vary along those axes. Sadly I haven't found (after a cursory search of a couple of minutes) anything trying to compare direct gossip with anything else. Do you know of some review publications in this area, or some better starting points for the between-network-comparison facet?
@robryk Many many studies. Just Google a bit. You'll be reading until doomsday.