The Propagation of Counteracting Information in Online Social Networks: A Case Study

Abstract

Information propagation in online social networks has drawn a lot of attention from researchers in different fields. While prior works have studied the impact and speed of different information propagation in various networks, we focus on the potential interactions of two hypothetically opposite pieces of information, negative and positive. We experiment the amount of time that is allowed for the positive information to be distributed with wide enough impact after the negative information and different selection strategies for positive source nodes. Our results enable the selection of a set of users based on a limited operating budget to start the spread of positive information as a measure to counteract the spread of negative information. Among different methods, we identify that both eigenvector and betweenness centrality are effective selection metrics. Furthermore, we quantitatively demonstrate that choosing a larger set of nodes for the spread of positive information allows for a wider window of time to respond in order to limit the propagation of negative information to a certain threshold.