Impulse Strategies for Suppressing Cyber Propaganda With Awareness

Cyber propaganda has become an increasingly sophisticated tool for manipulating public perception and discourse within online social networks (OSNs). The effectiveness of cyber propaganda is strongly influenced by the interplay between individual awareness and the underlying topology of OSNs that facilitates the spread of propaganda. However, existing interventions primarily focus on continuous control strategies, which may not be feasible in certain real-world scenarios. Therefore, effectively suppressing the spread of cyber propaganda while taking into account the above impact factors remains a challenging problem. In this study, we propose a methodology that combines the optimal impulse control (OIC) theory with a novel propagation model to address this problem. Our propagation model is the first to take into account the effects of the cognitive differences and interconnectivity of OSNs on the dynamics of cyber propaganda. By employing the OIC framework and our newly developed propagation model, we formulate an OIC problem. The goal is to find impulse strategies that optimally balance the cost of intervention against its effectiveness. Using the impulse maximum principle, we establish the necessary conditions for optimal impulse strategies and construct an algorithm to solve the OIC problem. Our numerical experiments, conducted on three distinct social networks, demonstrated that: 1) awareness levels play a crucial role in effectively suppressing the spread of cyber propaganda on OSNs; and 2) our impulse strategies are significantly superior to random strategies in terms of suppression effect, thereby evidencing their cost-effectiveness.