Fig. 1

A diagram of the model s.t. Susceptible (S) agents are exposed to the fake news and transact to a Believer (B) or a Fact-Checker (F) state according to transition rates f_i and g_i, that are functions of the number of neighbors u_i in a given state, a credibility value α, and a spreading rate β. B and F agents can go back to their S state because of a forgetting probability p_f; Note that we do not admit the possibility for a Believer to transact to the Fact-Checker state because of an internal or external verification, as in our more ‘optimistic’ model presented in Tambuscio et al. (2015; 2018). In other words, we always set the so-called verifying probability for B→F to 0