A social media rumor spreading model with control mechanism by considering debunking strategies and tripartite game (pp.203-234)

In this paper, we consider the collaborative governance model of the two main entities for social media rumors, which is among the initial efforts to analyze the positive performance of opinion leaders in rumor control.To this end, we use a mathematical method to model the interplay, mechanism between rumor and anti-rumor information, and apply the game theory to analyze the decision-making results of social media and opinion leaders in rumor evolution system.More precisely, we propose a new Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Debunker-Recovered (SEIDR) rumor spreading-debunking model with two rumor-control main entities.The novel idea in the proposed model is to identify opinion leader as a main entity in rumor management and to introduce the probability coefficients of official media debunking rumor and opinion leader blocking rumor.Using the basic reproduction number, the local and global stabilities in both the rumor-free and rumor-existence equilibria are derived, along side efficient rumor-epidemic control strategies for rumor attacks.Considering the spreading process of rumor information flow, the opinion leader group is stratified into the upstream and downstream groups, which, along with the social media, constitute three players in the game.Then, we analyze the evolutionary game behaviors of the three players based on their own characteristics, and identify the optimal debunking efforts to reduce the speed and scale of rumor propagation.Meanwhile, some numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the feasibility of our theoretical results and the effectiveness of the obtained control strategies.