Modeling the Impact of Fake News on Citizens
Published in International Conference on Cognitive Modelling, 2018
Recommended citation: Tulk, S., Bagheri Jebelli, N., Kennedy, W. G., “Modeling the Impact of Fake News on Citizens”. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (pp. 187-192), Madison, USA: University of Wisconsin, 2018. http://niloofar-jebelli.github.io/files/ICCM-2018-Modeling-the-Impact-of-Fake-News-on-Citizens.pdf
The impact of “fake news” on the 2016 presidential election became a serious concern after the surprising results. The volume of fake news on social media, which people used as a serious news source, could have significantly affected voters’ opinions. It is important to consider how social and cognitive processes were affected by this fake news to estimate the true impact of this computational propaganda technique. We built a cognitive model of a citizen deciding what to believe when encountering election stories on social media, eventually developing an opinion and using motivated reasoning to help determine which stories are true. Modeling 100 citizens, we assemble polls of the agents over the 9 months leading up to the election that replicates the qualitative characteristics of actual polls but leaves many questions outside the purview of cognitive modeling.
Recommended citation: Tulk, S., Bagheri Jebelli, N., Kennedy, W. G., “Modeling the Impact of Fake News on Citizens”. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (pp. 187-192), Madison, USA: University of Wisconsin, 2018.