Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 10 0 050

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Online Social Networks and Media

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/osnem

Rumors and their controlling mechanisms in online social networks: A

survey
Mohammad Ahsan∗, Madhu Kumari
Computer Science and Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Due to the rapid exchange of information and large user base of social networking sites, these are focused
Received 8 April 2019 for gathering the latest information or news from people over the world. Anyone having an internet con-
Revised 3 September 2019
nected device can share thoughts or update on real-time events. Social media helps reporters as well as
Accepted 25 September 2019
common men in sharing useful information, but at the same time, it also leads to deliberate or accidental
spread of rumors, i.e. pieces of information having uncertain truth at the time of posting. During social
Keywords: crisis, people access these platforms to get relevant information. In the rush of being early responders
Rumor spread to a critical event users post the information even without checking its veracity and that further used
Rumor veracity by other users to fill-in their informational gap. So flagging out the unverified information can be useful
Rumor detection
in maintaining a distance from spreading the information that may end up being false. The openness of
Rumor control
online social networking platforms (i.e. Twitter or Facebook), presence of machine learning and NLP (Nat-
Twitter
ural Language Processing) based techniques give us a chance to inspect the conduct of people in posting
rumorous information. In this work, we summarize and present the efforts and achievements so far to
combat the spread of rumorous information. These efforts composed of analyzing the content of rumors,
properties of users who share rumors and network structure that favor the spread of such information.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Multidisciplinary analysis of rumor diffusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.3. Epidemiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.3.1. SI model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.3.2. SIS model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3.3. SIR model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Features categorization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. User-related features: emotional pressure, intellectual pressure, personal involvement, physical proximity, emotional proximity,
follow ratio (log10 ## ff ol ol l owers
l owing
), age, verified (whether the user is verified by Twitter or not) and tweet frequency . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Content-related features: importance, informational ambiguity, information with no clear source, believability, information
overload, information dearth and veracity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Network related features: communities, degree distribution and hubs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.4. Characteristics of extreme events: static or dynamic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Rumor veracity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Websites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ahsan@nith.ac.in (M. Ahsan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2019.10 0 050
2468-6964/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050

4.3. Certainty and evidentiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

4.4. Communities, source ambiguity, and corroboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.5. Cognitive psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.6. Machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.6.1. Message based features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.6.2. User based features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.6.3. Topic based features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.6.4. Propagation based features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.7. Web services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Rumor detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1. Identifying relevant posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. Regular expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.3. Speech acts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.4. Tweets timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.5. Semi-automatic approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Rumor control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Anti-rumor models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1.1. Delayed start model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1.2. Beacon model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1.3. Neighborhood model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. Rebuttals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3. Credible sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.4. Influential users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.5. Emergency officials and news media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Declaration of Competing Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Acknowledgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

1. Introduction
Social media has a profound effect on the way we communicate
nowadays. In the past, people had to use verbal and non-verbal
media to share information with other individuals, e.g. town criers
and drum. These mediums of communication were not sufficient to
convey information beyond few miles. So, to overcome these limi-
tations, people switched to print media (i.e. newspaper and books)
and mainstream media (i.e. televisions and radio). But there exists
a crisp boundary between journalists and ordinary citizens which
restricts people from sharing their experience and ideas. The ad-
vent of social media broke that boundary and enables individuals
to act as an audience and reporters as well. It broadens the di-
versity of information that people can receive from others. Some-
times it is hard to quantify how much our lives has been impacted
by social media until we check the scenario of a few years back.
At the beginning of this decade, envisioning the communication
paradigm that offered to us by social media applications like Face-
book and Twitter was quite unimaginable. Now, with the advent of
social media it is possible that information posted by a single user
receive the attention of millions of users within few seconds.
The applications of social media i.e. Twitter or Facebook, not
only assist the people to keep in touch with their friends and fam-
ily members, but also to get informed with breaking news and on-
going events. Due to huge user-base and trust among social media
users, these platforms have become a main source of information
for many users. If a social media user has mobile device with inter-
net connectivity, then he/she can post any information from any-
where at any time. This low cost of information exchange at online
platforms allows information to spread quickly and more widely
than ever before [1].
During unexpected extreme events (i.e. natural disasters and
terrorist attacks), people get tense and to remove their tension
they turn to mainstream media for getting a trustworthy and rel-
evant information. But mainstream media, i.e. televisions or radio,
have to follow their protocols before reporting the news and that
make them slow. On one hand, they have to catch the breaking
news and on the other hand, they have to wait for veracity check.
This situation slow down the reporting process of mainstream me-
dia and people move to social media for obtaining relevant in-
formation. The openness and flexibility of social media applica-
tions like Twitter enable its users to be a first responder of an
extreme event and cope up post-event situation by utilizing the
local knowledge [2]. This real-time reporting on Twitter is also ac-
knowledged by mainstream media and in many cases, social media
is cited as their source of information. For example, in 2010, after
a few moments of an incident, pictures and videos of earthquake
stricken Haiti were shared by Twitter users and mainstream me-
dia cite that information as their news source [3]. So, the speed
and ability of providing local information are the advantages of so-
cial media. Despite these benefits, social media are questioned for
its information quality. From the examination of Google’s search
results, it was found that Tweeter and blogs’ real-time informa-
tion mainly constitute of “fabricated content, lies, misinterpreta-
tion, and unverified events” [4].
The lack of accountability and veracity checking techniques at
social media platforms make them a perfect place to perform ill
practices i.e. spreading propaganda, spam, misinformation, and ru-
mors. The Oxford dictionary defines rumor as “a currently circulat-
ing story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth”. After an earth-
quake strike in Haiti, rumors circulated that “JetBlue and American
Airlines are offering free air travel to Haiti for doctors and nurses”
and “UPS will ship any package under 50 lbs to Haiti for free”. A
spokeswoman from JetBlue refute this information by saying that
they are flying only Haiti Consulate scrutinized relief workers, not
just anyone who is willing to fly [5]. A co-founder of Twitter, Biz
Stone, fairly recognized this problem and said that credibility is
a key for social media [3]. Social media information rarely con-
tains a warning label and knowing the correctness is not easy for
people until they refer other sources like social circles, televisions,
 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
microblogs or newspapers. So, before taking the ownership of
shared information and forwarding it to others there is need of
checking the credibility of information and its source.
1.1. Motivation
The rumors hold the ability of doing a significant amount of
harm, i.e. financial loss, reputation loss and in extreme cases even
danger of lives. This potential has prompted a long history of en-
deavors to comprehend rumor process and devise some combat-
ting methods. The primary technique utilized by government and
different authorities is communicating messages to the whole pop-
ulace to debunk rumors [1]. But this technique is difficult to adopt
in a situation where individuals believe that government has a per-
sonal stake in debunking such rumors, i.e. maintaining the lawful-
ness. For example, in 2003 a rumor was surfaced in Nigeria that
Polio vaccine is contaminated to kill fertility. These rumors were
spread broadly due to several factors, i.e. few years back the death
of 11 children due to a clinical trial and support of influential peo-
ple like politicians and religious leaders to these rumors. Nigerian
authorities spent around two years to combat these rumors. It was
the case of single governance, which took that much of the time.
In case of social media, national borders are crossed and a con-
founded situation exists where some users trust the authority and
others doubt it. So, to combat the spread of rumors on social me-
dia there is a need of more robust approach.
2. Multidisciplinary analysis of rumor diffusion
Rumor diffusion has been extensively studied in the field of
psychology, sociology and epidemics from last 70 years. In this sec-
tion, we present key findings of these areas to understand the ru-
mor diffusion process from a multidisciplinary viewpoint.
2.1. Psychology
Most of the online social networks became a part of our life
in the last fifteen years. However, in the field of psychology, ru-
mors’ propagation and their counter measures have been exten-
sively studied from seventy years [6]. Researchers in psychology
mainly carried out their work in offline manner and very few
of their studies are there to examine the online content [1]. The
main focus of prior research which examine the online content was
to understand the dynamics of information diffusion and not to
check the veracity of information [7–9]. Social psychologists have
found some rumor causing factors like information ambiguity and
scarcity [10,11]. These characteristics are commonly presented by
extreme events like earthquake and terrorist attacks. When people
experience these events, they get anxious to understand the uncer-
tainty of the situation. Initially they turn to reliable news sources
such as mainstream media for getting relevant information and if
these sources do not timely provide the required information then
people use social media platforms to release their anxiety. Anxiety
hinders cognitive ability of people and make them to believe an
information that would otherwise not to be believed under nor-
mal conditions. The more anxious a person is, more likely he/she
spreads the rumors [12]. The ambiguity of information leads peo-
ple to share it further because “our minds protest against chaos”
[13]. Therefore, more ambiguous an information, more frequent the
communication among people for extracting a clear meaning out
of it. Researchers have also explored some other psychological fac-
tors, i.e. information accuracy and its importance that affect rumor
spread [14,15].
After exploring rumors’ characteristics that were pervasive dur-
ing the Second World War , Allport and Postman [13] mod-
eled rumor spreading as a function of ambiguity and importance
3
(Rumor∼ =Ambiguity × Importance). The multiplicative nature of this
function represents that for the growth of a rumor, it must be
shrouded with some level of ambiguity and recipients must find it
important. If the content of the rumor is not important then there
is no incentive in sharing it with others and without ambiguity the
information is a fact and do not need any subjective interpretation.
In 1973, Anthony [16] argued that measuring the importance of
an information is a difficult task and she used a psychometric tool
“Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale” [17] to comprehend importance fac-
tor under the concept of anxiety. The reasoning behind this change
is – if a person feels anxious about a piece of information then it
signals the importance of information for him. In this formulation,
rumor is conceived as a method of releasing emotional strain by
explaining ambiguous information.
2.2. Sociology
Allport et al. [13] and Anthony [16] studied the affective aspect
of anxiety whereas Bordia et al. [14] examined its cognitive angle
and recognize rumor as a collective process of reducing informa-
tional uncertainty. In the absence of adequate information from le-
gitimate sources, people continually attempt to extract meaningful
information about uncertain situations. From a sociology perspec-
tive, rumor is viewed as a “collective process that arises when ade-
quate information is unavailable, from formal or legitimate sources,
to interpret a problematic situation or event” [18]. It means rumors
develop when an unexpected or unfamiliar situation arises and an
interpretation is required to know how to respond to the situation.
This approach strikingly differs from psychological theory of
Allport and Postman [13] which considers rumor as a false in-
formation. However, both domains agree with the finding that
extreme events such as natural disaster [13,18] and terrorism
[19] provide the optimal condition for rumor spread by creating
an anxious environment and generating ambiguous information.
Rumor researchers of both domains provide insights for reduc-
ing anxiety and controlling rumor spread in affected communities.
They analyzed that timely provision of credible information from
trustworthy sources play a key role in subsiding anxiety and com-
batting rumor spread.
2.3. Epidemiology
The process of rumor spread and epidemic spread is often com-
pared by the researchers. In epidemiology, robust framework has
been developed for modeling the spread of pathogens. Each indi-
vidual is assumed to belong to one of these states: susceptible (S),
infectious (I), and recovered (R). Susceptible individuals are healthy
people, infectious are contagious who can infect other people, and
recovered class represents those who have been infected prior but
returned to a healthy state, and hence not infectious. Similarly, in
rumor diffusion, susceptible nodes are unaware of the rumor and
known as ‘ignorants’, infected nodes spread rumors to the neigh-
boring nodes and referred as ‘spreaders’, and recovered nodes have
known the rumor but do not spread it further, these nodes are
called as ‘stiflers’. There are few well-studied models for epidemic
spread i.e. SI, SIS and SIR model. In these models, the number of
susceptible, infected and recovered individuals, at time t, is de-
noted by S(t), I(t) and R(t) respectively.
2.3.1. SI model
In this model, an individual can be in one of two states: sus-
ceptible (healthy) state or infected (sick) state. It is assumed that
susceptible individuals become infected at the rate β after coming
in contact with infected individuals. In this model, if an individ-
ual becomes infected, then it cannot recover to a healthy state and
remains infected forever. Assuming each individual has k contacts
4 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050

and equal probability of being in contact with an infected individ- phenomenon and provides a more realistic explanation of informa-
ual. The chance of an infected individual to contact the susceptible tion diffusion in online social networks. There is a common struc-
nodes is k S(Nt ) . Since I(t) individuals are transmitting the disease ture in online social networks known as community which shows
at the rate β , the total spread in time frame dt becomes: information trapping behavior and often prohibits large scale infor-
mation diffusion [21,22]. These communities are formed on a par-
S (t )I (t )
dI (t ) = βk dt ticular theme or interest and that is why members of a community
N
prefer to share information with each other rather than with non-
dI (t ) S (t )I (t ) community members. Due to this behavior information get trapped
= βk in a local region and do not spread globally. Independent spread-
dt N
ers break this barrier by carrying information from one network
di to another network. This model explains why some rumors spread
= βksi, globally even in the presence of communities.
dt
Xia et al. [23] have considered official sources of information
where s and i represents a fraction of susceptible and infected in- that release authoritative information during the spread of ru-
dividuals i.e. s = S(Nt ) and i = I (Nt ) . mors. The classical SIR model is extended to a two-stage model
di – SIAR model. At first stage, 0 ≤ t < τ each node can be in
= βk i (1 − i ) one of three states: susceptible (S), infected (I) and stiflers (R).
dt
At t = 0, a random node is chosen from susceptible nodes as in-
di di fected (spreader) and all other nodes remain susceptible (ignorant).
+ = βkdt Ignorant nodes become spreaders at a spreading rate λ(0 ≤ λ <
i (1 − i )
1) after coming in contact with spreaders. In second stage, t = τ (τ
On integrating both sides, we get > 0) a random node is chosen from susceptible nodes as authori-
tative which spread authoritative information. Whenever an igno-
ln i − ln (1 − i ) + C = βkt
rant node comes in contact with authoritative node, it becomes
At t = 0, we get: authoritative at a diffusion rate β (0 < β ≤ 1). If a spreader con-
tacts other spreader, authoritative or stifler nodes, then the con-
io ioeβkt 1
C= , i= and τ= , tacting spreader becomes a stifler at the rate α . It happens because
( 1 − io ) 1 − io + ioeβkt βk spreading node finds other sharing or refuting the shared infor-
where τ is the characteristic time that required in reaching a 1/e mation which represents that news lost its value. Spreaders also
fraction of susceptible individuals. Hence, increasing either the turn to stifler state, even without contacting other nodes at a for-
likelihood of disease transmission (β ) or degree of individuals (k) getting rate δ (0 < δ ≤ 1). This study examined the critical thresh-
enhances pathogen spreading speed. old (λc ) of SIR and SIAR models and found an increment in λc of
Here, at the beginning, pathogen spreads exponentially, but SIAR model. It means it is tough to spread rumors if authoritative
with the passage of time infected individuals encounter a less sources are there to inform the ignorant nodes about rumors. If the
number of susceptible nodes and spread slows down for large t. rumor spreading rate of a network is less than critical threshold, λ
At the end of the epidemic, everyone becomes infected i.e. < λc , then rumor cannot spread in that network. They observed
i(t → ∞) = 1 and s(t → ∞) = 0. that sooner the authoritative information is available, lesser is the
negative impact of rumors. So, authority should release the infor-
2.3.2. SIS model mation as soon as possible.
An individual can only be in one of two states: susceptible and Borge et al. [24] proposed two modifications to classical rumor
infected; but infected individuals can recover to a susceptible state models to capture activity pattern and apathy of individuals. Hu-
at a fixed rate μ. So, total spread of pathogen in time frame dt be- man beings have a heterogeneous (i.e. not always active) activity
comes: pattern and their activities are not randomly distributed over time
[25–27]. It has been observed that activity distributions are cor-
di
= βki(1 − i ) − μi, related with degree distributions [28]. Rumors die out soon if they
dt
are posted by low degree nodes and shared persistently if triggered
where μi is the rate at which individuals recover from the disease. by high degree nodes. The effective way of implementing this cor-
relation is to assign each node an activity probability ai = ki /kmax ,
2.3.3. SIR model where ki is the degree of node i and kmax is the maximum node-
For many pathogens, individuals develop immunity after they degree in the network. The first modification assigns these activ-
recover from infection. Hence, instead of returning to susceptible ity probabilities and second considers the possibility of apathetic
state, they get removed from the population. These recovered indi- ignorant node which shows no interest in the rumor and directly
viduals do not count any longer from the perspective of pathogen goes to stifler state. This is a common behavior in online social net-
as they cannot be infected, nor they can infect others. At the end, works where received messages are rarely spread further. In this
everyone recovers from infected states i.e. i(∞) = 0. model, when an ignorant node comes in contact with spreaders,
These epidemic models have been extensively used by rumor the ignorant node becomes spreader with a probability λp and sti-
researchers. Qian et al. [20] present SIR-like rumor model which fler with a probability λ(1 − p), where p is probability that the ig-
captures the scenario of independent spreaders. These spreaders are norant node is interested in diffusing the rumor.
ignorant nodes who learn a rumor without interacting with neigh- From psychology, we learn that informational ambiguity and
bors within the network. In epidemics, susceptible individuals re- scarcity are the roots of a rumor generation on the online so-
ceive pathogen from infected neighbors, but in social media, igno- cial networks. For the growth of a rumor, it need to be masked
rant nodes can receive rumor without interacting with neighboring with some level of ambiguity and recipients must find it impor-
nodes, for example: a Twitter user can learn about a rumor from tant. Sociologists analyzed rumor as a collective process of releas-
Facebook instead of his/her followees within Twitter. It means ru- ing anxiety when adequate information is unavailable from legiti-
mor diffusion on one social network can be affected by other net- mate sources during an unclear situation. Finally, due to a resem-
works. The introduction of independent spreaders captures this blance between epidemic spread and rumor spread, the concepts
 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
Table 1
Multidisciplinary factors that affect rumor spread on online social networks.
Area of research Factors
Psychology Ambiguity, scarcity [10,11]
Anxiety [12]
Ambiguity, importance [13]
Ambiguity, anxiety [16]
Sociology Absence of adequate information from legitimate sources
[18]
Natural disaster [18] and terrorism [19]
Epidemiology Independent spreaders [20]
Authoritative information [23]
Activity pattern and apathy [24]
of epidemic modeling are used to understand spreading and for-
getting mechanism of rumors on social media. Table 1 provides a
brief summary of key findings.
3. Features categorization
With the popularity of Twitter as an important source of infor-
mation, it is also highly abused for the spread of rumors. During an
emergency or serious event, people get anxious to understand the
uncertainty of the situation and start spreading information with-
out checking its factual accuracy. There exist multiple features that
contribute to the birth and growth of rumors on Twitter i.e. anxi-
ety of users, ambiguity of information, personal involvement in the
event, physical and emotional proximity to the event. These fea-
tures are broadly categorized as:
3.1. User-related features: emotional pressure, intellectual pressure,
personal involvement, physical proximity, emotional proximity,
follow ratio (log10 ## ff ol
ol l owers
l owing
), age, verified (whether the user is
verified by Twitter or not) and tweet frequency
Emotional pressure represents anxiety and intellectual pressure
points to ambiguity. During extreme events (i.e. earthquake or ter-
rorist attack), official news sources do not provide the required in-
formation in a timely manner and people get anxious to compre-
hend the situation. To alleviate the tension, people share the un-
official information with their friends and interpret that to get a
coherent understanding of the unclear situation. There are a num-
ber of features which affect the information sharing behavior of
social media users. The more anxious a person is, more likely
he/she spreads rumors [12,29,30]. The ambiguity of the informa-
tion source represents the veracity of information. The more am-
biguous an information source is, the more frequent is the com-
munication for information seeking and sharing [19]. The feeling
of personal involvement in a disaster event is positively related to
the spread of rumors [12]. Huang et al. [31] interviewed the par-
ticipants to examine the effect of physical and emotional proxim-
ity on the spread of rumors during 2013 Boston Marathon Bomb-
ings. Several participants conveyed that they put more trust on the
5
Findings
√
Information ambiguity and its scarcity lead to rumors spread as our minds
protest against chaos.
√
The more ambiguous a person is, the more likely he/she spreads the
rumors.
√
Rumor spread is a multiplicative function of information ambiguity and its
importance. If any of these becomes zero, there will be no rumor.
(Rumor ∼= Ambiguity × Importance)
√
Anxiety signals the importance of information. If a person feels anxious
about a piece of information then it is important for him.
(Rumor ∼= Ambiguity × anxiety)
√
Rumor is a collective process that arises when adequate information is
unavailable from legitimate sources for interpreting a problematic
situation.
√
Natural disaster and terrorism provide optimal conditions for rumor
spread by creating an anxious environment and generating ambiguous
information.
√
These spreaders learn rumors without interacting with users of their
network. They overcome the information trapping capabilities of online
communities by carrying information from one network to another.
√
In the presence of authoritative nodes (SIAR model), critical threshold (λc )
of a network get increased. It means rumor spreading is tough if
authoritative sources are these to inform ignorant nodes about rumors.
√
Activity distributions are correlated with degree distributions.
√
Rumors posted by high degree nodes shared persistently and by low
degree nodes die out soon.
√
When an ignorant node comes in contact with spreaders, it becomes
spreader with probability λp and stifler with probability λ(1 − p).
sources physically close to the event. Apart from physical proximity
– a physical distance between the people and disaster event, emo-
tional proximity – a sentimental association with disaster affected
people or disaster location, also played a significant role in rumor
mongering. The follow ratio of a person represents his/her reputa-
tion and determine whether a person is likely to support rumors
or deny them. In the context of news reporting, users with high
follow ratio are news organizations which are assumed to provide
well-grounded information with certainty and evidences. But the
pressure of journalism makes them to shift their priorities from
pre-publication verification to post-publication verification. It cre-
ates the possibility of rumor posting by these reliable sources of
information. So, it is concluded that high follow ratio tends the
users to support rumors and low follow ratio makes them to deny
rumors [32]. The age of a user, verified status and tweet frequency
do not show a significant difference in deciding whether a person
is rumor supporting or not.
3.2. Content-related features: importance, informational ambiguity,
information with no clear source, believability, information
overload, information dearth and veracity
Allport and Postman [13] define rumor as a multiplicative func-
tion of informational ambiguity and its importance. A rumor can-
not be there if any factor becomes zero. Oh et al. [12] found that
information with no clear source is more important rumor caus-
ing factor than anxiety. It is contrary to the findings of traditional
research on rumors which considers anxiety as most important ru-
mor causing factor. The absence of informational source produces
anxiety among users and motivate them to further share the in-
formation in order to find the actual truth. The believability of a
rumor does not affect its subsequent spread during natural disas-
ters [33,34]. But, when a rumor is important to users and its be-
lievability is high then it spreads more frequently [35]. So, without
importance the believability of a rumor does not affect its spread.
Information overload hampers the emergency responders in effi-
ciently providing the credible information to the right people in a
timely manner [36]. Information dearth is a lack of local informa-
6 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
tion required by people to form localized decisions [12]. The ve-
racity of rumors also affects their spread; false rumors spread for
a longer time than true rumors. The veracity resolution of false
rumors takes more time than true rumors because proving the
counter evidences is a more challenging task than proving some-
thing true. Before resolution people tend to share rumors, but after
resolution their interest is decreased. So, false rumors get spread
for a longer time than true rumors.
3.3. Network related features: communities, degree distribution and
hubs
The structure of connections among social media users matters
extensively in the spread of rumors [37]. There is a common struc-
ture in online social networks known as community which hinders
the information spread. Due to dense intra-community connectiv-
ity and sparse inter-community connectivity, a user most likely
shares the rumors with members of his/her own community. This
reinforcement leads the rumors get trapped in one community
and decrease their reach. Communities also helpful in spreading
rumors as they impose a social influence on the people to trust
the received information without checking its factual accuracy or
source credibility [38]. Degree distribution is the probability that a
randomly selected node from a network has degree k and it affects
the rumor spreading dynamics. Online social networks are scale-
free and follow power-law degree distribution where some nodes
have a very high degree, known as hubs. These hub nodes rapidly
spread the rumors by taking them to a large number of ignorant
nodes (people unaware of the rumor), but at the same time, it can
hinder rumors spread [37]. After knowing that every friend already
knows about the rumor, people lose interest in the rumor and do
not spread that further. So, hubs play both roles: supporting as
well as hindering rumor spread.
3.4. Characteristics of extreme events: static or dynamic
The characteristics of extreme events help in understanding the
dynamics of rumor spread [19]. Natural disasters have static post-
event impact and authorities find it feasible to provide the rele-
vant information to the affected community in a timely manner.
The timely availability of certain information from credible sources
subside the anxiety of people and leads to rumor control. But, dur-
ing terrorist attacks, terrorists are dynamic and they keep moving
from one location to another. In this situation, it becomes infeasi-
ble for the authority to process the available information and re-
turn back with some related information. So, these events lead to
the growth of rumors.
4. Rumor veracity
Most of online social networks suffer from the spread of ru-
mors. These rumors seem credible to social media users, but ver-
ifying their veracity is a challenging job. The existing approaches
for solving this task are:
4.1. Experts
It is usually done with the help of experts like journalists who
analyze the claims made in rumors and information released by
authorities. If the claims are found in accordance with authorita-
tive information then rumors are annotated as ‘true’, otherwise,
‘false’. Sometimes, these experts do not find sufficient information
to decide the veracity of rumors and annotate the rumors as ‘un-
verified’. This approach is expensive and sometimes it is not easy
to include third-party (i.e. journalists) in our research projects.
4.2. Websites
The alternate approach is to take the help of websites like
Snopes.com and FactCheck.org. These websites document online
rumors and stories of uncertain truth. They provide ground-truth
annotations regarding rumors veracity.
4.3. Certainty and evidentiality
Zubiaga et al. 2016 [32] annotated rumors by examining three
dimensions of rumors: (i) support and response type, (ii) certainty,
and (iii) evidentiality. Support reflects whether the message given
in a source tweet is supporting, denying, or presenting an un-
clear view about the tweet’s content. Response type is a support
that response tweets provide to the source tweets. This factor is
extremely useful in determining rumors’ veracity. It has the fol-
lowing annotations: agreed – when a response tweet supports its
source tweet, disagreed – when a response tweet denies its source
tweet, appeal for more information – when a response tweet ap-
peals for additional information about its source tweet, and com-
ment – when the author of a response tweet is not interested in
assessing the veracity and just makes a comment. Certainty is the
degree of confidence that authors expressed regarding their tweets.
These are the annotations of certainty: certain – when an author is
confident about the content of his/her tweet, somewhat certain –
when an author is partially confident, uncertain – when an author
is totally unsure.
Evidentiality reflects the type of evidence provided by the au-
thors regarding the statements made in their tweets. It has these
annotations: attachment of a URL, attachment of a picture, em-
ployment of reasoning, first-hand experience, no evidence, quota-
tion of a person or organization, and quotation of an unverifiable
source. There is not much of a distinction in certainty, but evi-
dentiality reflects a significant change in different veracity values
of rumors (true, false, or unverified). All three dimensions are an-
notated through a crowdsource platform named as Crowd Flower
[39]; in order to get done in a timely manner. But the usage of
crowdsource platforms is not suitable for the task of assessing the
rumors veracity [40]. This approach favors to give ‘true’ annota-
tions to the false rumors.
4.4. Communities, source ambiguity, and corroboration
Communities affect the information spreading behavior by im-
posing a social trust on the users. The members of same com-
munity share strong connections with each other and tend to be-
lieve an information shared by other members, without checking
its factual accuracy and source ambiguity. But, in Twitter, commu-
nity members do not share such strong connections and not eas-
ily accept a dubious information. Here, source ambiguity is use-
ful in evaluating the veracity of circulating information. Huang
et al. [31] interviewed people after Boston Marathon Bombings and
found that corroboration is a method of determining the credibility
of circulating information.
4.5. Cognitive psychology
The spread of rumors or misinformation depends on the assess-
ment of truth-value of this information by the receivers. Cognitive
psychology provides the following factors to determine the authen-
ticity of information: consistency of message, coherency of mes-
sage, credibility of source and general acceptability. An information
is easily accepted when it is consistent and compatible with the
pre-existing beliefs of the people. If the facts or statements con-
tained in a message are coherent and have no contradiction, then
there are more chances of the message acceptance. The perceived
 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
credibility of the information sender and repetitive exposure to the
information increase the acceptability of information. These factors
are highly utilized by the researchers for measuring tweets’ credi-
bility [21,22,41,42].
4.6. Machine learning
Castillo et al. [21] estimate tweets credibility by utilizing su-
pervised learning techniques. They used four types of features for
training their supervised models:
4.6.1. Message based features
The presence of question marks or exclamation marks in a mes-
sage, presence of hashtags, message is a retweet or not, length of
the message, and the number of words with positive or negative
sentiment.
4.6.2. User based features
These are the properties of users who have posted the mes-
sages i.e. number of followers, number of followees, number of
tweets posted by a user, and account age (time since a user cre-
ated his/her account).
4.6.3. Topic based features
These features are derived from the previous feature sets
(message-based and user-based), for example, the fraction of
tweets containing hashtags, the fraction of tweets containing URLs,
and the fraction of tweets having words of positive and negative
sentiment.
4.6.4. Propagation based features
These features are related to a propagation tree generated from
the retweets of messages. These features are included in this cat-
egory: depth of the retweet-tree and number of initial tweets of a
topic.
Initially, data samples were assigned their labels (or classes) by
using Mechanical Turk [43]. Then the labelled data were used to
train a number of supervised models like Bayes networks, decision
trees, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The best performance
achieved through these models was given by decision tree (with
J48 algorithm), an accuracy of 89%.
The fraction of tweets containing URLs is the root of the deci-
sion tree and hence most important feature for accessing tweets’
credibility. Tweets with no URL tend to be related with a non-
credible information. The sentiment of tweets is also a relevant
feature in the task of credibility prediction. A credible informa-
tion is very much related to the fraction of tweets with negative
sentiments, rather than positive sentiments, which tend to express
non-credibility. Tweets with more number of retweets are consid-
ered more credible. Users who post non-credible information tend
to have a small number of followers and only posted a very few
tweets so far. The number of followers, followees and tweet activ-
ity (number of tweets posted by a person) represent the reputation
score of the users. Credible users tend to have a high reputation
score and the credibility of tweets increase as they pass through
highly reputed users.
4.7. Web services
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk): It is a web service that pro-
vides human intelligence. Even after so much advancement in
computing technology, there are many jobs that can be done more
effectively by human beings than computers, like identifying ob-
jects in a photo. Companies or developers who need Human Intel-
ligence Tasks (HITs) to be done can use MTurk API for accessing
the services of thousands of global, high quality, and on-demand
7
Table 2
Regular expressions to identify verification and
correction patterns.
Pattern Regular expressions
Verification is(that|this|it)true
wh[a]∗ t[?!][?1]∗
(real?|really?|unconfirmed)
Correction (rumor|debunk)
(that|this|it) is not true)
workers. Castillo et al. [21] used MTurk to annotate the credibility
of collected tweets and then utilized the annotated data to train
machine learning models for the prediction of tweets credibility.
Truthy: This web service was developed by the researchers of
Indiana University, USA. It tracks political memes to detect the
spread of misleading information during elections. It visually rep-
resents how misleading memes spread during election hours and
enables the users to sort them on the basis of the number of
tweets, number of retweets, number of users, and the size of the
largest connected component [22].
5. Rumor detection
There are very serious consequences of the spread of false ru-
mors on peoples’ lives and their reputation. During terrorist attacks
or natural calamities access to credible information is very much
required for the well-being of people. But, on social media, infor-
mation never come with a label of rumor or non-rumor and even a
rumorous information seems credible. Rumor detection helps peo-
ple by identifying whether an information is spreading a rumor or
not. It is a binary classification where a set of social media posts
are passed to the rumor detection system and each post is assigned
a class out of these two classes: rumor (R) and non-rumor (NR).
There are various approaches which are followed by the rumor re-
searchers for detecting rumors on social networks, as represented
in Fig. 1.
5.1. Identifying relevant posts
Early research on rumor detection was only limited to identify
relevant posts of pre-identified rumors [44]. The relevancy of posts
can be measured by training a machine learning model on the pre-
viously identified rumors. For example, by training a classifier on a
set of rumors i.e. ‘Obama is a Muslim’, we can identify that ‘Obama
is not Muslim’ is a relevant post and ‘Obama was talking to a group
of Muslims’ is an irrelevant post. But this approach only works for
identifying long-standing rumors, where new unseen rumors are
relevant to the posts that were used for training the classifier. It
fails when new unseen rumors have a different context as there is
no training about these rumors. So, with every context-switching
of rumors, this approach needs the researchers to identify new ru-
mors and re-train the classifiers. To overcome this issue and iden-
tify rumors during fast-paced contexts i.e. breaking news, classi-
fiers need to be trained on some generalizable patterns.
5.2. Regular expressions
There are certain needs that led the social media users to share
information with each other i.e. the need of verifying a contro-
versial information. These needs not only assist in rumor spread,
but also provide a clue of rumor detection. Rumors provoke skep-
tic users to post tweets for enquiring their veracity. Zhao et al.
[45] have utilized these findings and manually curated a list of five
regular expressions to identify tweets that contain verification and
correction patterns (Table 2).
Tweets with these patterns are clustered on the basis of a sim-
ilarity score given by Jaccard coefficient and a single statement
8 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
Fig. 1. Methods to detect long-standing and fast-paced rumors on Twitter.
is extracted from each cluster. These statements are used to pull
more tweets that discuss these statements. Then they employ two
human annotators to manually annotate tweets as R or NR on the
basis of collected tweets, statements extracted from clusters, and
related information from Web search. In this work, the speed of
rumor detection using regular expressions is compared with trend-
ing topics and popular memes. Trending topics and popular memes
can reveal some rumors, but they both produce many false posi-
tives and have a low precision. They analyzed that the use of en-
quiry tweets (tweets with verification patterns) not only helpful in
detecting more rumors but it also contributes to earlier detection.
Detection of rumors by using enquiries and correction pattern is
found to be 4.3 h earlier than correction only, 3.6 h earlier than
trending topics, and 2.8 h earlier than popular memes. There is a
considerable room for improving this approach of rumor detection
i.e. automatic filtering of correction and enquiry posts rather than
using some manually curated list of regular expressions, automatic
detection of rumors, and finding features that are potentially re-
lated to the veracity of the rumors.
5.3. Speech acts
Vosoughi [46] have developed a rumor detection model by us-
ing the pragmatics of tweets. The semantic (i.e. opinion words,
emoticons, n-grams, etc.) and syntactic (i.e. #, @, punctuations,
part-of-speech etc.) features of tweets have been extensively an-
alyzed by the researchers for detecting rumors, but sometime lit-
eral meaning is not sufficient and context is required to understand
the exact meaning of an information. Pragmatics consider how the
context of an information contributes to its meaning. In this work,
speech acts (assertion, expression, question, recommendation, re-
quest, and miscellaneous) are used as pragmatics. The recognition
of these speech acts is a multi-class classification problem and four
classifiers have been trained on a manually labelled dataset with
3312 binary features – 1647 semantic and 1666 syntactic. Seman-
tic features used in this task are: opinion words [47], vulgar words
[48], emoticons [49], English speech act verbs, and n-grams; and
syntactic features are: punctuations, # (hashtag), @ (user mention),
RT (retweet), part of speech, and abbreviations [50]. The purpose of
identifying speech acts is to detect assertions which form the basis
of rumors. By training and testing these classifiers: naïve Bayes, de-
cision tree, logistic regression and SVM, they observed that logis-
tic regression outperforms the other three classifiers in detecting
assertions and gives 91% accuracy. After detecting tweets contain-
ing assertions, the next step is to pass them to a hierarchical clus-
tering module. This module clusters tweets by using tf − idf cosine
similarity and produce a set of clusters, each containing tweets of
similar assertions. In tf − idf, tf counts the number of times a term
occurs in a tweet and idf measures the number of tweets that con-
tains a term and represent how much informative it is – general
or informative.
5.4. Tweets timeline
Zubiaga et al. [51] identify rumors by enlisting the help of ex-
perienced annotators (i.e. journalists). In the process of rumor de-
tection, a single tweet is not always enough to determine whether
it is a rumor or not. So, they developed a tool which displays
the timeline of event specific tweets. They have used #ferguson
keyword with Twitter’s streaming API to collect tweets associated
with Ferguson unrest. There are a large number of tweets associ-
ated with this event and manual annotation of all is not feasible.
So, tweets not having a specific number of retweets are discarded
as rumor tends to spark a decent number of retweets. The next is-
sue is the limited context of a rumor. To enhance the context of
a rumor they also collect replies associated with the tweets be-
cause replies help in determining the nature (R or NR) of a post.
They examined that rumors percentage decreases with a decrease
in the number of retweets and rumors sparked more replies than
non-rumors due to controversial nature. It also observed that ru-
mors take longer time for annotation than non-rumors as annota-
tors have to explain the reason of considering tweets as rumors.
5.5. Semi-automatic approach
On social media, although it is possible to manually annotate
the post as R/NR but it encounters certain challenges in the form
of label quality and time. Social media data come in non-structural,
noisy and multi-modal (i.e. text, pictures, and video) form. The an-
notation of new unseen rumors at these platforms needs a deep
knowledge of the domain. But it is not always possible to get the
experts of a domain in a timely manner and low quality labels are
assigned to the posts under investigation. Due to these low qual-
ity labels, rumor detection systems fail to provide an accurate de-
tection of rumors. Twitter overcome this issue by implementing a
 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
semi-automatic strategy which uses an algorithm [52] to automat-
ically assign a credibility rating to each post and lets the users to
give their feedback on these ratings.
6. Rumor control
The spread of rumors causes a significant amount of harm in
the form of financial loss, reputation loss and lives of people. This
potential has led to a long thread of research for providing ru-
mor combatting mechanisms. The primary mechanism that gov-
ernments have utilized to combat rumors is centralized where an
authority broadcasts anti-rumor messages to the whole popula-
tion [1]. But it is ineffective in situations where people mistrust
the motives of authority. Therefore, a strategy where anti-rumor
messages are not propagated by a centralized authority is the only
feasible solution for combatting rumors. Tripathy et al. [53] have
formulated three anti-rumor models: delayed start model, beacon
model and neighborhood model.
6.1. Anti-rumor models
These models utilize the trust (links) of social media users to
propagate anti-rumor messages rather than the power of authori-
ties.
6.1.1. Delayed start model
This model is known as the decentralized method of rumor
combatting. It models the situation where a single authority de-
tects the rumor spread after n time units and decides to start
anti-rumor process. First, a random infected node Vi is selected
by the authority to start anti-rumor process and then Vi spreads
anti-rumor messages to its neighboring nodes Ni . Each neighbor-
ing node w|w ∈ Ni accepts anti-rumor with probability p (p is 0.05
in [54]).
The time between the start of rumor and start of an anti-rumor
process is a limitation of this model. In this time lag, rumors
spread freely in the network. To overcome this problem, beacon
model is developed.
6.1.2. Beacon model
It is a semi-centralized method and more proactive than the
delayed start model. Here, authority selects a set of vigilant nodes,
beacons, and embeds them in the network to continually lookup
for the rumors. The selection of beacons may be random or topic
specific (i.e. a beacon for technology may not be a beacon for
sport). On receiving a rumor, beacon immediately starts spread-
ing anti-rumor to its neighbors. So, in the beacon model, starting
time of anti-rumor process is not fixed and depends upon the time
when a beacon receives the rumor.
In the delayed start model, the starting time of anti-rumor pro-
cess is fixed but in Beacon model, the location of the beacons is
fixed in the network and start of anti-rumor process depends on
the time when beacons encounter some rumor.
6.1.3. Neighborhood model
It is fully decentralized where each node can detect rumor with
some probability and spread anti-rumor messages to the neighbor-
ing nodes. In this model, beacons are not selected by the authority,
but self-created during the spread of rumors. A beacon model with
b nodes as beacons and n total nodes is comparable with a neigh-
borhood model which have nodes refuting rumors with probability
b
n.
The spread of anti-rumors do not dominate rumors spread un-
til a wide distribution of rumors [55]. This is the main reason of
rumors spread even when non-rumors are present on social me-
dia platforms because people more likely receive rumors than non-
rumors.
9
The other rumor controlling approaches are: rumor rebuttals,
reliable information from credible sources, exposing people to in-
formation that refutes rumors, dropping messages from highly in-
fluential users, news media, and frequent update from emergency
officials.
6.2. Rebuttals
It has been advocated by a number of studies that rumor re-
buttals and refutation eliminate reliance on rumors to a degree
[13,14,56]. But according to psychological studies, these are ineffec-
tive in decreasing belief on rumors. People build a mental model
on the received information when alternative information is ab-
sent; any correction presented after model generation has no sig-
nificant effect on the people and they may prefer to keep their
models [57]. This persistent reliance is termed as ‘continued influ-
ence effect’. So, to enhance the effectiveness of rumor control, a
repetitive rebuttal or correction is required at the time of initial
exposure to rumorous information [58].
6.3. Credible sources
Oh et al. [19] have analyzed the effect of information released
from credible sources. They suggest that a credible information
contribute to subside anxiety of Twitter communities during ex-
treme events. The reduction of anxiety, improves information qual-
ity and suppress groundless rumors.
6.4. Influential users
Sathanur et al. [59] study rumor control by dropping messages
from influential users. These users generally have a large num-
ber of followers and mainly utilized by the marketing companies
for rapidly distributing their information to the targeted audience.
During elections, these are also misused for spreading propagandas
and rumors. But in this study, they are targeted in an opposite way
– to combat the rumor spread rather than spreading rumors. It has
been analyzed that dropping messages from these influential users
is helpful in controlling a rapid spread of rumorous information
from Twitter-like social media platforms.
6.5. Emergency officials and news media
Jones et al. [60] suggest that emergency officials should spread
required information to the affected people in real time. It pre-
vents people from getting anxious and spreading rumors. When-
ever possible, new information should be added in each update as
it makes them feel that the information is not auto-generated and
coming from official sources. News media are also advised to share
a responsibility of spreading accurate information.
7. Conclusion
With the rise in popularity of online social networks, the pen-
etration of these platforms is also increased for spreading rumors.
Rumors can cause a significant harm to people in the form of fi-
nancial and reputation loss. This survey provides a summary of ru-
mor causing factors and methods that are utilized to check the ve-
racity of shared information, to detect rumors and to control the
spread of rumors. From psychology, sociology and epidemiology
we came to know that anxiety, absence of adequate information
from legitimate users and activity pattern affect rumor diffusion
among people. This survey discusses how the veracity of the ru-
mors is checked with the help of human experts, machine learning
techniques and web services. It also explains the rumor detection
10 M. Ahsan and M. Kumari / Online Social Networks and Media 14 (2019) 100050
methods that are highly utilized for detecting rumors at online so-
cial networking platforms, especially Twitter. Finally, we listed ru-
mor combatting methods in order to protect the people from the
chaotic situation created by the spread of rumorous information.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Ministry of Electronics and
Information Technology (MEITY), Government of India. We would
like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their in-
sightful comments.
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Further Reading
M. Ahsan, M. Kumari, T.P. Sharma, Detection of context-varying rumors on Twitter
through deep learning, Int. J. Adv. Sci. Technol. 128 (2019) 45–58, doi:10.33832/
ijast.2019.128.05.