Proactive rumor control in online networks

Abstract

The spread of rumors through online networks not only threatens the public safety but also results in loss of financial property. To serve as a reliable platform for spreading critical information, many work study the problem of rumor control which aims at limiting the pernicious influence of rumors. These methods, however, only assume that users are passive receivers of rumors even if the users can browse the rumors on their own. To overcome this issue, in this paper we study the rumor spread from a proactive perspective and introduce a novel rumor control problem, called users’ B rowsing based rU mor blocK (BUK). Given a rumor set R, BUK can be summarized as targeting k nodes as ‘protector..