Analysis of antagonistic dynamics for rumor propagation

The extreme boom of online social networks paves the way for rumor propagation, which may incur an economic loss and cause further public panic. Hence, there is a pressing need to develop countermeasures for reducing side effects posed by rumors. Different from the state-of-the-art work that mostly conducted micro-perspective studies, our paper focuses on a macro-perspective one. In detail, our study neglects technical details and analyzes the antagonistic dynamics between the rumormonger and the rumor suppressor, which provides a deep understanding of the overall development trend of rumor propagation. To reveal the potentials of the rumormonger and the rumor suppressor, the competence-oriented analysis is proposed, where the sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of the Nash equilibrium in this rumor game are proved rigorously, helping us to derive steady ratios of people who trust or deny a rumor. To figure out the optimal strategy to strike back the rumormonger, the target-oriented analysis is conducted, in which the analytical solutions when the strategies of both players are static are solved and an iteration algorithm is employed to obtain the numerical solutions when their strategies are dynamic. Both numerical and real-world-data based simulations are adopted to verify the proposed competence-oriented and target-oriented analyses.