Endogenous Attention and the Spread of False News

TL;DR

This paper models how endogenous attention influences the spread of false news on social media, showing that user behavior and attention costs can either amplify or mitigate falsehoods depending on system parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic social media model incorporating endogenous attention, revealing how user focus and story credibility affect false news propagation.

Findings

Reducing false story credibility can increase false news prevalence.

Higher exogenous false story production amplifies spread through user sharing.

Enhanced user reach can favor truth or falsehood depending on conditions.

Abstract

We study the impact of endogenous attention in a dynamic social media model. Each period, a user observes a random story and decides whether to share it. Users like sharing true and interesting stories, but identifying false stories requires costly attention. Depending on parameters, the system exhibits either a unique limit or strong path dependence. Endogenous attention responds to changes in false story credibility, so reducing credibility can boost their prevalence. Increases in the exogenous production rate of false stories can be amplified by users' sharing decisions. Increasing users' capacity to reach others amplifies both true and false stories; we identify conditions under which the net effect favors truth over falsehood.