Modeling and Analysis of Rumor Spreading with Social Reinforcement Mechanism

Abstract

It is of great practical significance to figure out the propagation mechanism and outbreak condition of rumor spreading on online social networks. In our paper, we propose a multi-state reinforcement diffusion model for rumor spreading, in which the reinforcement mechanism is introduced to depict individual willingness towards rumor spreading. Multiple intermediate states are introduced to characterize the process that an individual's diffusion willingness is enhanced step by step. We study the rumor spreading process with the proposed reinforcement diffusion mechanism on two typical networks. The outbreak thresholds of rumor spreading on both two networks are obtained. Numerical simulations and Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to illustrate the spreading process and verify the correctness of theoretical results. We believe that our work will shed some light on understanding how human sociality affects the rumor spreading on online social networks.