Mitigating Misinformation Spread in Blockchain-Based Online Social Networks

This article designs a blockchain protocol to mitigate the spread of misinformation in online social networks. The blockchain protocol processes social media postings as transactions, with misinformation being treated as double-spend attacks. The probability and duration for a double-spend attack to succeed within the blockchain protocol are used to compute the misinformation propagation time distribution. Our findings indicate that the rate of misinformation propagation in blockchain-based online social networks is inversely correlated with the fraction of honest miners who reject double-spend attacks. To further analyze the dynamics of misinformation propagation, we employ a susceptible–infectious–recovered (SIR) model combined with preferential attachment in a multicommunity network, which accounts for homophily and community structure in social networks. Numerical experiments using parameters estimated from real-world Twitter hashtag datasets show that the proposed blockchain protocol can reduce the number of users exposed to misinformation by delaying its propagation.