Spreading processes are ubiquitous both in nature and in our society. As an example, the propagation of news, opinions, and rumours can have a huge impact in electoral campaigns and financial markets, as well as potentially influencing the behaviour of crowds.
Therefore, studying the related dynamics and mechanisms is fundamental to understand and forecast several social phenomena. The relevance of spreading processes is also reflected in the growing interest which is gaining among scientists belonging to different communities.
This, combined with the complex and interdisciplinary nature of the topic, gave rise to the development of several different investigation approaches, ranging from analytical to computational and data-driven models.
The aim of this special issue is to collect contributions able to shed new light on the different aspects of social spreading. The resulting collection is expected to constitute an updated reference for those interested in understanding how spreading phenomena are affecting our society, and which tools can be implemented for their analysis.

We welcome Original Research and Reviews on the following topics:

- Opinion, language and innovation dynamics
- Rumor and (fake) news spreading
- Human behaviours
- Evolutionary Game Theory
- Computational Social Science
- Diffusion on graphs
- Temporal networks
- Epidemiology
- Urban mobility
- Crime patterns
- Blockchain, cryptocurrencies and markets

Keywords: rumor spreading, fake news, crowd behaviour, game theory, blockchain, epidemiology, urban mobility, crime patterns

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.