Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement

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Hauptverfasser: Tian, Lin, Booth, Emily, Bailo, Francesco, Droogan, Julian, Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Tian, Lin
Booth, Emily
Bailo, Francesco
Droogan, Julian
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
author_facet Tian, Lin
Booth, Emily
Bailo, Francesco
Droogan, Julian
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
contents In today's digital age, conspiracies and information campaigns can emerge rapidly and erode social and democratic cohesion. While recent deep learning approaches have made progress in modeling engagement through language and propagation models, they struggle with irregularly sampled data and early trajectory assessment. We present IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal embeddings. Our model excels at predicting engagement patterns within the crucial first 15-30 minutes of posting (RMSE 0.118-0.143), enabling rapid assessment of content reach. By incorporating interval-censored modeling into the state space framework, IC-Mamba captures fine-grained temporal dynamics of engagement growth, achieving a 4.72% improvement over state-of-the-art across multiple engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, and emojis). Our experiments demonstrate IC-Mamba's effectiveness in forecasting both post-level dynamics and broader narrative patterns (F1 0.508-0.751 for narrative-level predictions). The model maintains strong predictive performance across extended time horizons, successfully forecasting opinion-level engagement up to 28 days ahead using observation windows of 3-10 days. These capabilities enable earlier identification of potentially problematic content, providing crucial lead time for designing and implementing countermeasures. Code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/ic-mamba. An interactive dashboard demonstrating our results is available at: https://ic-mamba.behavioral-ds.science.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04655
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement
Tian, Lin
Booth, Emily
Bailo, Francesco
Droogan, Julian
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
Computation and Language
In today's digital age, conspiracies and information campaigns can emerge rapidly and erode social and democratic cohesion. While recent deep learning approaches have made progress in modeling engagement through language and propagation models, they struggle with irregularly sampled data and early trajectory assessment. We present IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal embeddings. Our model excels at predicting engagement patterns within the crucial first 15-30 minutes of posting (RMSE 0.118-0.143), enabling rapid assessment of content reach. By incorporating interval-censored modeling into the state space framework, IC-Mamba captures fine-grained temporal dynamics of engagement growth, achieving a 4.72% improvement over state-of-the-art across multiple engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, and emojis). Our experiments demonstrate IC-Mamba's effectiveness in forecasting both post-level dynamics and broader narrative patterns (F1 0.508-0.751 for narrative-level predictions). The model maintains strong predictive performance across extended time horizons, successfully forecasting opinion-level engagement up to 28 days ahead using observation windows of 3-10 days. These capabilities enable earlier identification of potentially problematic content, providing crucial lead time for designing and implementing countermeasures. Code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/ic-mamba. An interactive dashboard demonstrating our results is available at: https://ic-mamba.behavioral-ds.science.
title Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04655