Abstract for: The Spread of Political (Mis)information

Standard models of the spread of misinformation and group polarization assume that agents have identical preferences and all prefer an equilibrium in which the population learns the truth. However, in the context of an election, individual preferences for candidates vary and citizens prefer that information supporting their preferred candidate spreads while negative information about their candidate does not. In this paper, we construct and analyze a model of the spread of true and false information in which individual voters hold such preferences. In particular, voters are less likely to share information that hurts their preferred candidate, even if they believe that information. Agent preferences have the power to shift public opinion, resulting in false beliefs even in the absence of false information or many commonly suggested psychological biases. Introducing false information, we find that if individuals reject signals that they deem implausible, there is an intermediate extremeness for false signals that produces the greatest shift in public opinion. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the impact of electoral context on misinformation spread. Agents in our model use a number of heuristics to determine how they share and respond to information. We believe these simple rule-of-thumb behaviors reflect underlying utility functions. As we further develop this project, we plan to incorporate a more detailed analysis of the impact of these utility calculations.