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.