You could be forgiven for thinking that Robert Darnton and others had left nothing for anyone to say about the French Revolution – not that this stops many from holding forth anyway.

Yet Antoine Parent, a French economist at University Paris 8, is one of the co-authors of a study published in Nature (27/8) which uses epidemiology to explain the Great Fear which preceded the Revolution. Their findings go beyond the Revolution and have significant implications for today’s political environment.

It all started in 1789 when rumours spread like a virus across France – rumours that bandits were attacking villages, destroying crops and terrorising peasants while armed militias are claimed to have burned hundreds of wealthy landowners homes and manors. Nobles were accused or organising it all as a way to supress political unrest.

Yet, while it was actually untrue, it caused panic and upheaval which helped to provoke the French Revolution. George Lefebvre’s 1932 book, The Great Fear of 1789, is still regarded as the seminal work on the Fear but a new approach is suggesting something more complicated and also apposite for the world today.

Parent said she and the other authors had “managed to identify the logic behind the dissemination of the Great Fear.”

Parent, whose primary work focusses on applying complex systems analysis to the study of history, was meeting the physicist Stefan Zapperi and pathologist Caterina La Porta at conference at the University of Milan when she shared a plan to investigate the spread of Great Fear rumours.

La Porta suggested: “Why don’t we use the techniques that we use to study epidemics?” They started with Lefebvre’s book which contains letters and other documents indicating how rumours travelled from place to place. Then they used historical road maps to identify possible dissemination routes and this allowed them to create a detailed map of possible dissemination routes. Zapperi said they treated it “as a transmission network for an epidemic.”

They factored in other things and found that towns with higher rates of literacy were more likely to experience the Great Fear than the less-literate. They also examined demographic and economic data – such as literacy rates, what prices and land ownership.

While it was centuries after the great English Peasants’ Revolt – a key target for Great Fear rioters were lands where lordships required a lord to possess legal papers endorsing their claim – and these papers were destroyed as they were by the English peasants.

Zapperi said that while the Great Fear was unfounded the conditions that fomented it were real.

The current digital information (and misinformation) environment also makes things much more interconnected and chaotic than back then. He says: “The Great Fear provides a vivid example of the role of the spreading of rumours has in driving political changes that might be relevant today. Today information and misinformation can spread much faster than in the past.”

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web in his memoir – This is for Everyone – says: “Currently, the web is lacking in compassion, but this is not a human failing. This is a design issue. Back in 2016 I realised that there was something wrong with the technical side of the web that was encouraging toxicity. I identified two symptoms, stemming from the same disease.”

“The web is lacking in compassion, but this is a design issue. The most egregious symptom is polarisation. Social media, as currently built, leads users to take extreme political positions and demonise the opposing side. This makes constructive engagement difficult, allows outlandish conspiracy theories to flourish, and promotes demagoguery over deliberation. Soon, civilised discussion about important issues becomes impossible. Polarisation, I fear, might have dire outcomes for humanity, with consequences on a global scale.”

Echo chamber social media are all contributing to this. In a paper in Political Behaviour (13/2) on the effects of partisan elites’ violent rhetoric support for political violence Taegyoon Kim demonstrates that elite partisan violent rhetoric supports actual political violence as does fearmongering.

So what is the answer? Yuval Noah Harari, author of the books Sapiens and Nexus says: “If a social media algorithm recommends to people a hate-filled conspiracy theory, this is the fault not of the person who produced the conspiracy theory, it is the fault of the people who designed and let loose the algorithm.”

That’s an argument which raises many questions. For instance, it lets Trump – a draft dodger who is one of the world’s most relentless promoter of misinformation and violence against opponents in the world – off the hook.

And, it’s no accident that many of the far right protestors in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne see Trump as a hero.