Distributed Rumor Blocking in Social Networks: A Game Theoretical Analysis

Social networks have become important platforms for communication and information exchange. Unfortunately, misinformation and rumor also spread rapidly and widely through online social networks. Therefore, rumor controlling is one of the critical problems in social networks. It is often assumed that there is a single authority whose goal is to minimize the spread of rumor. However, what if there is no such an authority, and instead, there are some distributed agents who generate positive cascades but try to maximize their own private utilities? Can the negative information be blocked effectively by these agents who do not cooperate with each other? To answer these problems, we in this paper formulate the rumor blocking game and provide a game-theoretical analysis. According to whether or not the agents are aware of the rumor, we herein develop the rumor-aware game and the rumor-oblivious game, respectively. We show that the stable state (i.e. Nash Equilibrium) of the game guarantees the $2$-approximation and $\frac{2\cdot e-1}{e-1}$-approximation under the scenarios of best-response and approximate-response, respectively. As verified by the experiments performed on real-world networks, the rumor blocking game is effective in limiting the spread of rumor.