Containment of misinformation spread in online social networks

Abstract

With their blistering expansions in recent years, popular on-line social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Bebo, have become some of the major news sources as well as the most effective channels for viral marketing nowadays. However, alongside these promising features comes the threat of misinformation propagation which can lead to undesirable effects, such as the widespread panic in the general public due to faulty swine flu tweets on Twitter in 2009. Due to the huge magnitude of online social network (OSN) users and the highly clustered structures commonly observed in these kinds of networks, it poses a substantial challenge to efficiently contain viral spread of misinformation in large-scale social networks.