Dual-Feature-Driven Nonlinear Evolution of Social Misinformation

The nonlinear evolution of social misinformation is simulated in this paper via swarm simulation. The widespread adoption of social networks has intensified the threat to societal stability posed by the rapid dissemination of misinformation. Previous research has primarily focused on static propagation pathways or singular intervention mechanisms, failing to expound the nonlinear evolutionary dynamics of information attributes and their synergistic interactions with user feedback. To address this gap, a dual-feature-driven swarm simulation model was proposed to elucidate the asymmetric evolutionary patterns of misinformation propagation, characterized by the interdependent dynamics of “propagation power” and “misleadingness.” By integrating a long-tail perturbation mechanism to simulate content distortion and incorporating user awareness, reporting behaviors, and platform interventions, the proposed framework captures the spatio-temporal evolution of misinformation diffusion across 10,000-node small-world networks over 500 discrete time steps.