Analysis and modeling of rumor spreading in social networks using status transmission mechanisms

Abstract Normally, there is no limit for information sharing in social networks and this leads to the rapid propagation of information regardless of their validity. This process has resulted in a significant negative impact on social interactions, because the propagation of fake information may lead to the spread of harmful rumors. Hence, the importance of analyzing the rules of rumor spreading in social platforms is understood as a hot issue by the research society. Most of the rumor spreading models have been developed based on classical epidemic transmission models such as SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed). However, these models cannot properly apply the importance of topology structure and user differences in rumor propagation. To address this problem, this paper develops the ILSHR (Ignorant–Lurker–Spreader–Hibernator–Removal) rumor spreading model, which is designed based on a state transition mechanism considering the nodes degree. The ILSHR model overcomes the coarse-grained problem in describing rumor propagation by considering the role of different users. We carried out many experiments on real social networks to prove the rationality of the ILSHR model. Numerical simulations show that the accuracy of our model has achieved improvements compared to existing works.