Modeling the Influence of Fake Accounts on User Behavior and Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks

The mechanisms of information diffusion in Online Social Networks (OSNs) have been studied extensively from various perspectives with some focus on identifying and modeling the role of heterogeneous nodes. However, none of these studies have considered the influence of fake accounts on human accounts and how this will affect the rumor diffusion process. This paper aims to present a new information diffusion model that characterizes the role of bots in the rumor diffusion process in OSNs. The proposed SIhIbR model extends the classical SIR model by introducing two types of infected users with different infection rates: the users who are infected by human (Ih) accounts with a normal infection rate and the users who are infected by bot accounts (Ib) with a different diffusion rate that reflects the intent and steadiness of this type of account to spread the rumors. The influence of fake accounts on human accounts diffusion rate has been measured using the social impact theory, as it better reflects the deliberate behavior of bot accounts to spread a rumor to a large portion of the network by considering both the strength and the bias of the source node. The experiment results show that the accuracy of the SIhIbR model outperforms the SIR model when simulating the rumor diffusion process in the existence of fake accounts. It has been concluded that fake accounts accelerate the rumor diffusion process as they impact many people in a short time.