A prospect-theoretic evolutionary game approach for disinformation governance in social-media ecosystems

The viral spread of disinformation on participatory media platforms threatens public opinion integrity and social stability. To support effective governance decision-making, we propose a prospect-theoretic evolutionary game model involving three bounded-rational actors: regulators, social media platforms, and self-media operators. By incorporating a prospect-theoretic value function to capture loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity ignored by traditional utility models, we derive the stability conditions for the system’s ideal cooperative equilibrium where regulators disclose information truthfully, platforms moderate proactively, and self-media operators verify content. Numerical simulations show that initial cooperation propensity, reward–penalty intensity, and loss aversion significantly influence system convergence. The findings provide actionable and incentive-compatible policy guidelines for curbing online disinformation.