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Information Degradation and Misinformation in Gossip Networks

2025/01/22 by Thomas Jacob Maranzatto, Maranzatto, Thomas Jacob, Arunabh Srivastava +3
Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Applications #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.13086

openalex publication_date 2025/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We study networks of gossiping users where a source observing a process sends updates to an underlying graph. Nodes in the graph update their neighbors randomly and nodes always accept packets that have newer information, thus attempting to minimize their age of information (AoI). We show that while gossiping reduces AoI, information can rapidly degrade in such a network. We model degradation by arbitrary discrete-time Markov chains on k states. As a packet is transmitted through the network it modifies its state according to the Markov chain. In the last section, we specialize the Markov chain to represent misinformation spread, and show that the rate of misinformation spread is proportional to the age of information in both the fully-connected graph and ring graph.

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