IPSR Model: Misinformation Intervention through Prebunking in Social Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rai, Robert, Sharma, Rajesh, Meena, Chandrakala
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Rai, Robert
Sharma, Rajesh
Meena, Chandrakala
author_facet Rai, Robert
Sharma, Rajesh
Meena, Chandrakala
contents The rapid dissemination of misinformation through online social networks poses a growing threat to public understanding and societal stability. Prebunking, a proactive strategy based on inoculation theory, has recently emerged as an effective intervention to build cognitive resilience against misinformation before exposure. In this work, we investigate the impact of prebunking on misinformation dynamics using a compartmental modeling framework. We first analyze the classical Ignorant-Spreader-Stifler (ISR) model, its parameters are determined using empirical rumor data from Twitter. We then propose an extended model, the Ignorant-Prebunked-Spreader-Stifler (IPSR) model, which incorporates prebunking as a preventive state and includes a forgetting mechanism to account for the decay of cognitive immunity over time. Using mean-field approximations, we derive steady-state solutions and examine the effect of prebunking on the spreading of misinformation. We further investigate the robustness of the IPSR model by varying network size and average degree. In addition, we analyze the model's behavior on Watts-Strogatz and Barabasi-Albert networks to assess the role of small-world and scale-free structures in shaping intervention outcomes. Our results show that the inclusion of prebunking significantly reduces the scale of misinformation outbreaks across different network structures. These findings highlight the efficacy of prebunking as a scalable intervention strategy and underscore the utility of compartmental models in understanding and mitigating information-based contagion in complex networks.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IPSR Model: Misinformation Intervention through Prebunking in Social Systems
Rai, Robert
Sharma, Rajesh
Meena, Chandrakala
Physics and Society
The rapid dissemination of misinformation through online social networks poses a growing threat to public understanding and societal stability. Prebunking, a proactive strategy based on inoculation theory, has recently emerged as an effective intervention to build cognitive resilience against misinformation before exposure. In this work, we investigate the impact of prebunking on misinformation dynamics using a compartmental modeling framework. We first analyze the classical Ignorant-Spreader-Stifler (ISR) model, its parameters are determined using empirical rumor data from Twitter. We then propose an extended model, the Ignorant-Prebunked-Spreader-Stifler (IPSR) model, which incorporates prebunking as a preventive state and includes a forgetting mechanism to account for the decay of cognitive immunity over time. Using mean-field approximations, we derive steady-state solutions and examine the effect of prebunking on the spreading of misinformation. We further investigate the robustness of the IPSR model by varying network size and average degree. In addition, we analyze the model's behavior on Watts-Strogatz and Barabasi-Albert networks to assess the role of small-world and scale-free structures in shaping intervention outcomes. Our results show that the inclusion of prebunking significantly reduces the scale of misinformation outbreaks across different network structures. These findings highlight the efficacy of prebunking as a scalable intervention strategy and underscore the utility of compartmental models in understanding and mitigating information-based contagion in complex networks.
title IPSR Model: Misinformation Intervention through Prebunking in Social Systems
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12740