Analyses of the impact of online social networks addiction on the propagation of rumors

Abstract The growing popularity of online social networks (OSNs) has emerged phenomenon of addiction to OSNs, known as OSN-addiction, which has widely attracted researchers to study its impact on individuals. The OSN-addiction can lead to the dissemination of information without being convinced of its reliability. Moreover, the last couple of years have witnessed the appearance of OSNs that allow users to obtain profits of their content, such as YouTube. They create the ambition to have an extra income where individuals will seek for content that offers more views. As a result, these OSNs increase the degree of OSN-addiction in which it can significantly affect the propagation of rumors since they spread faster and broader than usual information. Therefore, this paper studies the effect of OSN-addiction on the propagation of rumors with the epidemic model. Thus, we propose a novel model that extends of the classical SIR model by integrating the role of addicted individuals into the spreading process based on psychological studies. A theoretical analysis is presented for homogeneous and heterogeneous networks, demonstrating a significant influence of OSN-addiction on the propagation of rumors. Finally, experiments were conducted on homogeneous networks, heterogeneous networks and real large-scale network (YouTube). The results confirm the theoretical analysis and illustrate the significant influence of the addicted individuals to amplify the impact of the propagation of a rumor whereas in particular cases it also accelerates the propagation.