Original title: How neighbourhood ideology shapes misinformation belief in densely tied social networks
Soroush Karimi, Marcos Oliveira, Diogo Pacheco · September 2026
False news spreads quickly on social media, but older computer models often ignore personal beliefs when tracking how people accept false claims. The researchers built a model to study how personal bias and social pressure interact. The model looks at how strongly people hold their beliefs and how well a false claim matches those beliefs. People then share and react across a social network. The researchers found that social pressure changes how much personal bias and message match matter. Most importantly, the impact of your neighbours' ideological strength on your own beliefs depends heavily on how closely those neighbours are connected to each other. Both personal bias and network links decide whether misinformation takes hold.
You are trying to decide if a rumor about a new restaurant is true. You ask a few friends, and their opinions are shaped by their own preferences. But if all those friends know each other and already agree, their opinions reinforce each other more strongly than if they were strangers. In this paper, the researchers model how the connectivity of friends in a social network changes how much their pre-existing views affect your belief in false news.
People who get news on social media are affected not just by their own beliefs but by their online network. The structure of that network—how tightly connected friends are—changes how much ideology pushes someone to believe false claims. This means fighting misinformation requires understanding network connections, not just correcting individual biases.
The abstract doesn't say what the limitations are, but it only presents a theoretical simulation without empirical validation. It does not account for factors like source credibility or fact-checking. The results are based on a specific model and may not generalize to all types of misinformation or social networks.
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How neighbourhood ideology shapes misinformation belief in densely tied social networks — Soroush Karimi, Marcos Oliveira, Diogo Pacheco
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.