An Effective Rumor Control Approach for Online Social Networks

TLDR: Experimental results show that periodic education to the selected population will eradicate the rumor from the network and devise a rumor-free equilibrium.

Abstract: Since the rumor spreading has a negative impact on the stability of Online Social Networks (OSNs), rumor diffusion study is becoming an important research area in recent days. The main causes for rumor spreading are lack of education and lack of official information. Promotion of education and official information through social media applications against the disease is called as “Social Vaccine”. In this paper, a novel social vaccine approach called Pulse Vaccination for Rumor Control (PVRC) is proposed to combat the rumor spreading. A novel algorithm is proposed to find the portion of the population to provide PVRC in regular intervals. A Spreader(S)-Educated Spreader(U)-Ignorant(I)-Educated Ignorant(V)-Recovered(R), USVIR, rumor dynamics model is proposed to study the vaccination approach. This model illustrates the impact of the vaccination on rumor propagation with respect to time in OSNs. We evaluated the proposed approach on four different datasets. Experimental results show that periodic education to the selected population will eradicate the rumor from the network and devise a rumor-free equilibrium.