RBOTUE: Rumor Blocking Considering Outbreak Threshold and User Experience

When a rumor breaks out in online social network (OSN), it can lead to significant negative impact on human society, especially in the context of public emergencies, such as pandemic. Toward restraining rumor outbreak in OSN, one of the effective containment measures is to block influential users to minimize the spread of rumors. However, most of previous efforts ignore the imbalance between the cost and effect of rumor suppression. To fill this gap, from the perspective of public opinion crisis, a dynamic rumor spread model called PISIR model is established, which takes into account the overall popularity and individual tendency of rumors. Based on this model, two rumor blocking algorithms considering outbreak threshold and user experience, called 1-Hop and 2-Hop RBOTUE algorithms, are proposed, respectively. In the algorithms, a hyperbolic discount effect-based user experience mode is introduced as the constraint to ensure the user experience in OSN, then the blocking strategy is implemented on the selected subset of nodes to keep the rumor spread scale always below the outbreak warning line. The experimental results in two synthetic networks and four real OSNs indicate that both 1-Hop and 2-Hop RBOTUE algorithms have lower rumor infection rate and require less number of blocked nodes, which means that proposed algorithms can achieve better blocking performance with less restraining cost of rumors in mainstream social networks, and the two algorithms also have different adaptability for different OSNs.