2020 IEEE 7th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA)

Simulation of misinformation spreading processes

in social networks: an application with NetLogo
Emilio Sulis Marcella Tambuscio
Computer Science Department Austrian Center for Digital Humanities
University of Torino Austrian Academy of Sciences
Turin, Italy Vienna, Austria
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—We introduce an agent-based framework (developed that can be used on a large scale to explore also slightly
in NetLogo, one of most relevant simulation platforms) to different and personalized versions of the model with the
simulate the diffusion of a piece of misinformation, according possibility to run the process on any topology.
to a known compartmental model in which the fake news and
its debunking compete in a social network. The tool allows to We strongly believe that this implementation can provide
set different values for the spreading rate of the news, the hoax a useful tool to realize what-if analysis [20] and represent
credibility, the probability of fact-checking and the forgetting rate various scenarios through agent-based simulations.
of the agents. Moreover, it is possible to run the process over any
given network. Since NetLogo is free and open source, our tool II. R ELATED WORKS
could be easily used and/or personalised by other researchers to
explore different scenarios of fake news spreading. A. Modeling information diffusion
Index Terms—Information Diffusion, Fake News Spreading, Representing information and rumor spreading through epi-
Fact-Checking, Agent-based modeling, NetLogo demic metaphors has a long tradition [21], [22]: a (fake)
piece of information, indeed, can be seen as a virus that
I. I NTRODUCTION
may potentially infect people. In particular, many works took
Misinformation spreading is currently one of the most inspiration from compartmental models in which there is a
discussed topics in our society, specially because, even if it population of agents connected among them, and each agent
is not a new problem, digital technology and new media can i at each time t can be in a state (compartment) si (t). The
foster its diffusion [1], [2]. Research about misinformation transitions are usually defined by simple equations ruled by
can be categorized on three main lines: automatic detection some probability rates. The most famous models of this cate-
of fake news and social bots [3]–[5], psychological aspects gory are the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) and the SIS
and effects [6]–[8] and finally analysis [9], [10] and model- (Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible). Many SIR-based models
ing [11]–[15] of their diffusion to understand its spreading have been proposed to model rumor spreading [11], adding
dynamics. forgetting and remembering mechanisms [23], the presence
Here we focus on the third research line and we provide of skeptic agents [14], and competition among rumors [13].
an application to simulate an hoax spreading process with The SBFC model that we consider here [15] has three states
NetLogo [16]. In particular we target the model presented (Susceptible-Believer-FactChecker) and agents have the pos-
in [15] that follows the epidemic tradition in representing sibility to be infected either by the hoax or by its debunking,
rumor diffusion. The novelty of this model is that misinfor- to forget their belief or verify the news (see details in section
mation and fact-checking are competing actors in a population III-A).
of agents that can decide whether believe or not to the hoax
depending on the credibility of the hoax and on belief of B. Agent-based modeling and diffusion processes
their neighbors; they can also verify or forget about the news In this paper we explore an initial implementation step
with certain probabilities that are parameters of the model. of a misinformation spreading model with multi-agent sys-
From a pure theoretical point of view, through simulations tems, intended as a specific class of computational models to
and mean-field analysis, the authors provided a threshold for simulate actions and interactions of autonomous agents, with
the verifying probability that ensures the eradication of the the main goal of assessing their effects on the system as a
hoax. whole. In particular, ABMs can “provide a more fine-grained
We investigate here the adoption of the same diffusion model of the process, with many parameters that can impact
process in an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) perspective [17]. the dynamics. We call such models, which explicitly model
ABM focuses on emergent phenomena [18] in complex adap- the individual agents, agent-based simulation models” [24]. In
tive systems [19]. Since the behavior of the chosen model has particular, we adopt NetLogo1 which is one of the most used
been extensively studied on scale-free and random networks,
the goal of this work is providing a tool developed in NetLogo 1 https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

978-1-7281-8206-3/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 614

DOI 10.1109/DSAA49011.2020.00086

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ABM platforms, here in use both as a modeling-simulation and a forgetting rate pf ∈ [0, 1]. The transitions through the
tool and as a general purpose tool. states can be summarized in three phenomena. First of all
The salient features of NetLogo include the capability of there are two spreading transitions (S → B, S → F C) that
managing collection of instances of a class of agents, tradi- determine when a susceptible agent i decides to believe or
tionally named turtles2 ; the openness, being a Free and Open not to the rumor. These transitions are defined respectively
Source Software (FOSS) written in Java and Scala; the avail- by two spreading functions fiB and fiF C that depend on the
ability of libraries or extensions to the basic code, to connect belief of the neighbors of agent i, the spreading rate β and
R [25] or Python [26]; in addition, an easy to use graphical the credibility α:
representation of the agents’ world. The diffusion processes nB
i (t)(1 + α)
in social media have been already simulated by following an fiB (t) = β (1)
ni (t)(1 + α) + nF
B C
i (t)(1 − α)
ABM perspective [27]. The role of social networks to predict
FC
ni (t)(1 − α)
the diffusion process has been explored in the context of the fiF C (t) = β B (2)
introduction of new products in a market [28], as well as on ni (t)(1 + α) + nF C
i (t)(1 − α)
different real-world Twitter networks structures [29]. B|F C
where ni (t) is the number of neighbors of i that are in the
III. M ETHODS Believer/FactChecker state at time t. Second, there is a veri-
fying transition B → F C that let a Believer become directly
A. Formal Description of SBFC model
a FactChecker (because he realizes that the news is a hoax,
for instance) and it is simply ruled by the verifying probability
1 − fiB (t) − fiF C (t) pv . Third, agents in Believer and FactChecker states can forget
their belief towards the news and return to the Susceptible state
with a probability pf . These transitions happen following the
S triplet pi (t + 1) = (pSi (t + 1), pB FC
i (t + 1), pi (t + 1)) that
describe the probabilities that the node i, that is in a state
fiB (t) fiF C (t)
si (t) at time t switches to a state si (t + 1) ∈ {S, B, F C} at
pf pf time t + 1. Formally:

B FC pSi (t + 1) =[1 − fiB (t) − fiF C (t)]sSi (t)+

pv (1 − pf ) pf [sB FC
i (t) + si (t)]
pB
i (t + 1) =fiB (t)ssi (t) + (1 − pf )(1 − pv )sB
i (t) (3)
(1 − pv )(1 − pf ) (1 − pf )
FC
pi (t + 1) =fiF C (t)sSi (t)+
Fig. 1. A diagram of the model SBFC. pv sB
i (t) + (1 − pf )sF C
i (t)
In [15] the dynamics of the process has been explored
The SBFC model [15] describes the diffusion of misinfor-
extensively varying the credibility and verify probability that
mation as a competition among a false news and its debunking
rule the victory of the hoax (high α low pv ) or the debunking
in a population of N agents. At each time t each agent i is
(low α high pv ); moreover, it was found analytically a thresh-
associated with a state si (t) that can take one of the three
old for the verifying probability that assures the false news
values:
will be eradicated. In following papers other more complex
• Susceptible (S), an agent who ignores the news;
versions of the model have been studied exploring the role of
• Believer (B), an agent who believes to the hoax;
network segregation [30] and effective fact-checking strategies
• FactChecker (FC), an agent who has verified the news or
placing some never-forgetting debunkers in specific nodes of
directly knows that it is an hoax. the network [31].
Formally we use a state indicator function for each time t:
B. NetLogo implementation
{S,B,F C}
si (t) = δ(si (t), {S, B, F C}) 1) Model structure: The three parts of each program are
Interface, Info and Code area. The Interface presents the sim-
and a triplet pi (t) = (pSi (t), pB FC
i (t), pi (t)) that collects the
ulation output area, and allows users in setting parameters by
probabilities that the node i is in the three states at time
using so called buttons for the interactions, e.g., sliders, switch,
t. Before giving the formulas for these probabilities, whose
chooser buttons. Each of them relates to the corresponding
random realization rules the dynamics of the system, we list
procedures in the Code area. The conventional structure of a
the parameters and the phenomena represented by the model.
NetLogo program includes an initial part of variables declara-
There are four fundamental parameters: the credibility of the
tions, followed by the procedures regarding the environment
hoax α ∈ [0, 1) that gives some advantage over its debunking,
(so called patches) as well as the agents (turtles). The two main
its spreading rate β ∈ [0, 1], a verifying probability pv ∈ [0, 1]
procedures in the code concern both the initialisation of the
2 The name Turtle is an inheritance from the Logo educational language world (setup procedure) and the execution of the simulation
https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/ (go procedure).

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 to setup computations, i.e. graph metrics or count of agents (well described
ca also by a line-plot graph).
setup-var 4) Network extensions: The network of agents is generated
setup-turtles according to a specific library included in the very first row of
update-plot the code with the command extensions [nw]. The creation of the
reset-ticks network is defined by the type-of-network button in the Interface
end (“Barabási–Albert algorithm” by default).
The initial setup resets the world to an initial, empty state (clear- IV. ABM OUTPUT
all), before the initialisation of the main variables in a specific setup-
var procedure. In our case, just the shape of agents as well as the A. The Network representation
text to print in the output area. The procedure setup-turtles creates At the beginning of the simulation, the initial setup of the model
the agents and the network, before updating the visualisation of the creates a network whereas agents are mostly Susceptible (90%),
line plot to count different kinds of turtles. Finally, the reset-ticks instead of Believer (10%). As described in Figure 2 edges are gray. In
button reset the time counter to zero, sets up the initial state of the addition, some procedures improve the visualisation of the graph by
world in the plots. adopting a spring layout, as well as expanding the distances between
The main cycle go consists of the continuous increment of time nodes.
steps until the stop condition (300 time steps) is reached (ticks).
to go
tick
if ticks > 300 [stop] ; the stop condition
spreading
forgetting
verifying
(...)
end
The three procedures in the main cycle are spreading, forgetting
and verifying corresponding to the functions for agents’ changing
state, as previously detailed in section III-A.
We describe here the code of the procedures forgetting and
verifying, while spreading just corresponds to the computation of the
above mentioned equations. In particular, the forgetting procedure Fig. 2. Output representation of the network in NetLogo. Agents’ color
describes how each agent, regardless of belief state, forgets the fake- indicates the corresponding State. Arcs are gray and a Force-directed Spring
news with a fixed probability pforget. Similarly, each agent can layout improves the visualisation.
fact-check the hoax with a fixed probability pverify in the verifying
procedure.
B. Simulation results
to forgetting ; B -> S; F -> S The execution of the simulation can be firstly explored in the graph
ask turtles with [state="B" or state="F"][ of the Interface. The count of the three different state types of agents
if random-float 1 < pForget [ describes the evolution of the diffusion process.
set state "S"
]
]
end

to veryfing ; B-> F ;
ask turtles with [state = "B"][
if random-float 1 < pVerify [
set state "F"
]
]
end
Fig. 3. The Interface tab in NetLogo platform with buttons on the left, the
2) State of agents: Each agent includes a variable state to trace network of agents in the center and simulation results described with a line
the personal condition, identified by a character: Susceptible (“S”), plot and monitors.
Believer (“B”), or FactChecker (“F”).
turtles-own [ 1) Verifying simulation trends: The model behaviour obtained
state ; "B", "F", "S" by varying initial parameters with NetLogo are consistent with the
] ones obtained in the original paper by simulations with R program-
ming language and mean-field analysis [15]. In first experimental
3) Display: The diffusion process is represented with three settings, Barabasi-Albert (BA) and Erdos-Renyi (ER) networks are
different colors for each state changing over time. Susceptible nodes considered with the same number of nodes (1,000) and mean degree
are gray, Believer nodes are blue and FactChecker nodes are red. (6). These simulations maintain fixed the values of both the spreading
The output area in the NetLogo Interface visualizes the network of rate (0.5) and the forgetting probability pforget (0.1), with the aim
agents connected by curved gray edges. Several buttons control the to understand the influence of fact-checking activity by varying
simulation setting, while some monitors display the results of some only pverify and the credibility parameter. Similarly, we tested other

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