A study of rumor control strategies on social networks

TLDR: These findings show that coupling the detection and anti-rumor strategy by embedding agents in the network, the authors call them beacons, is an effective means of fighting the spread of rumor, even if these beacons do not share information.

Abstract: In this paper we study and evaluate rumor-like methods for combating the spread of rumors on a social network. We model rumor spread as a diffusion process on a network and suggest the use of an "anti-rumor" process similar to the rumor process. We study two natural models by which these anti-rumors may arise. The main metrics we study are the belief time, i.e., the duration for which a person believes the rumor to be true and point of decline, i.e., point after which anti-rumor process dominates the rumor process. We evaluate our methods by simulating rumor spread and anti-rumor spread on a data set derived from the social networking site Twitter and on a synthetic network generated according to the Watts and Strogatz model. We find that the lifetime of a rumor increases if the delay in detecting it increases, and the relationship is at least linear. Further our findings show that coupling the detection and anti-rumor strategy by embedding agents in the network, we call them beacons, is an effective means of fighting the spread of rumor, even if these beacons do not share information.