Rumor Propagation In Online Social Networks

Rumor spreading is a common phenomenon in social life. In information age, because of the popularity of a new kind of media---the online social networks, people express their opinions more freely, and the cost of rumor spreading in online social networks becomes lower, which leads to much false information, known as rumor, spreading in online social networks. Rumor spreading always comes with upset feelings and threatens social stability. Therefore, it’s extremely important to study the characteristics of rumor spreading in online social networks so as to prevent and control it effectively.The dynamic of information spreading on complex networks is an important branch of complex networks study. In the past twenty years, there have been many significant achievements in epidemics, computer virus propagation and rumor spreading. This study focuses on the characteristics of rumor spreading in online social networks, the main content includes:(1)what are the differences between the characteristics of rumor spreading in online social networks and the characteristics of conventional rumor spreading pattern, how to divide people in online social networks in a new way, and to study people’s behavior in online social networks with the method of complex networks study.(2)social reinforcement is a common and apparent phenomenon in rumor spreading, which hasn’t been explained in conventional rumor spreading pattern, so the paper will define and describe the phenomenon in the new rumor spreading pattern.(3) the study of mobile social networks becomes a hot topic because of the popularity of mobile online networks, so the paper studies the new characteristics of rumor spreading behavior, and how to study in simulation experiment.The main contributions are as follows:1) In this research, a new rumor spreading model for rumor propagation in online social networks, Credulous-Spreader-Rationals(CSR) model, is developed. Analytically, a mean field theory is worked out by considering the influence of network topological structure. Under certain conditions, rumor spreads faster in CSR model than other rumor spreading models in online social networks.2) Classic rumor spreading model overlooked the social reinforcement influence. But this influence always exists in real society or online social networks. Recently, researchers started to take this influence into account. There is a clearly distinguished feature between "social reinforcement" in this study and the rest of papers. We assume social reinforcement contains positive and negative aspects, namely, if the Credulous doesn’t accept the rumor when he meets Spreader, acceptant probability will be increased as positive social reinforcement, it will be easier for him to accept the rumor at next time. However, if the Credulous meets Rationals after spreading process starts, the rumor acceptant probability of this Credulous will be declined because of the negative social reinforcement effects. In CSR model, negative and positive social reinforcements are considered in the acceptant probability model.3) In this paper present, we propose an improved CSR model for rumor spreading in Mobile social networks.The dynamic equation of rumor spreading is modified to be suitable for user’s habit in Mobile social networks. In the acceptant probability model, negative and positive social reinforcements are considered. Furthermore, the people’s Accepting threshold for rumor accepting is taken into account. Analytically, a mean field theory is worked out by considering the influence of network topological structure as homogeneous. Under certain conditions, rumor spreads faster and wider in new model than CSR rumor spreading model in homogeneous networks. Meanwhile, the Multi-agent simulation results indicate that the information spreading process is sensitive dependent on initial conditions.