Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 3: Poster

SOE 3.2: Poster

Monday, March 17, 2025, 17:30–19:30, P4

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Misinformation on Social Media — •Grace Galanthay and Eckehard Olbrich — Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Misinformation and disinformation are considered a significant problem with the rise of social media. While much research concentrates on the spread of information, our work focuses on the strategic actions of individual actors. Using a game-theoretic signaling framework, we study interactions where a sender communicates a noisy signal about the state of the world to a receiver, whose response determines payoffs for both actors. Existing ''cheap talk'' models explore strategic communication between two actors with misaligned preferences. We extend this framework to multiple senders and adapt the theoretical model to social media, where the traditional roles of sender and receiver merge. Our extension to a multi-actor signaling game in social media contexts represents a distinct approach to modeling the spread and strategic use of mis- and disinformation on digital platforms.

Keywords: misinformation; social media; game theory; cheap talk; signaling games