An Efficient Feedback Control Mechanism for Positive/Negative Information Spread in Online Social Networks

The wide availability of online social networks (OSNs) facilitates positive information spread and sharing. However, the high autonomy and openness of the OSNs also allow for the rapid spread of negative information, such as unsubstantiated rumors and other forms of misinformation that often elicit widespread public cognitive misleads and huge economic losses. Therefore, how to effectively control the negative information spread accompanied by positive information has emerged as a challenging issue. Unfortunately, this issue still remains largely unexplored to date. To fill this gap, we propose an efficient feedback control mechanism for the simultaneous spread of the positive and negative information in OSNs. Specifically, a novel computational model is first proposed to present the temporal dynamics of the positive and negative information spread. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism restrains the negative information spread with minimal system expenses by devising and performing three synergetic intervention strategies. Technically, this mechanism intensively evaluates the number of seed users performing three intervention strategies. Besides, each seed user performs the received control task independently, and then the control plan for the next time step is adjusted dynamically according to the previous feedback results. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed mechanism based on the extensive experimental results obtained from two real-world networks.