Abstract
Social bots can cause social, political, and economical disruptions by spreading rumours. The state-of-the-art methods to prevent social bots from spreading rumours are centralised and such solutions may not be accepted by users who may not trust a centralised solution being biased. In this paper, we developed a decentralised method to prevent social bots. In this solution, the users of a social network create a secure and privacy-preserving decentralised social network and may accept social media content if it is sent by its neighbour in the decentralised social network. As users only choose their trustworthy neighbours from the social network to be part of its neighbourhood in the decentralised social network, it prevents the social bots to influence a user to accept and share a rumour. We prove that the proposed solution can significantly reduce the number of users who are share rumour.
Highlights
Social Bots are autonomous software agents who promote or demote social media content with specific sentiments in online social networks (OSN)
Analytical evaluation: We prove that the proposed solution is privacy-preserving as social bots will not know the neighbours of the users in the decentralised social network (DSN) and the proposed solution is secure as social bots cannot circumvent the token-based content propagation to spread rumours
We prove that the proposed solution is correct as the balance in the channels owned by irrational users becomes too low to be used for content spreading
Summary
Social Bots are autonomous software agents who promote or demote social media content with specific sentiments in online social networks (OSN). The state-of-the-art methods to prevent rumour propagation include (1) identification of rumour sources, (2) automated detection of rumours, and (3) censorship of social media content and users by the OSN operator These methods can be useful for centralised solutions. Analytical evaluation: We prove that the proposed solution is privacy-preserving as social bots will not know the neighbours of the users in the DSN and the proposed solution is secure as social bots cannot circumvent the token-based content propagation to spread rumours. We prove that the proposed solution is correct as the balance in the channels owned by irrational users (who do not differentiate between a social bot and a genuine OSN user) becomes too low to be used for content spreading.
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