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Enhancing User Protection with Optimal Prebunking in Social Networks
by THE Tech EditorialistJune 14th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
Optimal prebunking aims to protect users from misinformation by delivering correct information before exposure. This early intervention strategy, akin to vaccination, reduces misinformation spread but cannot guard against misinformation originating from the protected user.
Author:
(1) Yigit Ege Bayiz, Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, USA (Email: [email protected]);
(2) Ufuk Topcu, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, USA (Email: [email protected]).
Table of Links
Deterministic Baseline Policies
Temporally Equidistant Prebunking
IV. OPTIMAL PREBUNKING PROBLEM
To guard user c against misinformation, we employ prebunking. Prebunking relies on inoculating the users in the network by providing the users with correct information before they encounter a misinformation that contradicts the correct information. The idea of prebunking is similar to that of vaccination, where an early intervention to misinformation can immunize some users against it, reducing misinformation spread in the population. Fig. 1 shows the effect of prebunking in a small network of users.
Lastly, we note that it is impossible to guard the center user c against a cascading misinformation k if the misinformation starts from c. As there is no way of estimating when a new misinformation cascade will start, there is no way to preemptively provide a prebunk to the central user c if a misinformation cascade starts on it. Thus, for theoretical analysis it is often necessary to assume that a misinformation cascade never starts at c. We rephrase this assumption as follows:
This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
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