CTL-DIFF: Control Information Diffusion in Social Network by Structure Optimization

A critical side effect of online social networks’ flourishing is fast-spreading rumors on the Internet, making the information diffusion control on social networks a fundamental requirement. While information diffusion control has received extensive attention at the global level, there have been fewer user-level diffusion control studies under minimal budget. In this article, we study the information diffusion at the user level and propose a diffusion control method based on gradient information to generate an optimized network structure, namely ConTroL information DIFFusion (CTL-DIFF). CTL-DIFF targets a user through subtle modifications of its local network structure. It first selects the edges with the largest absolute gradient based on the prediction model to optimize the original network’s structure. It then employs several prediction methods to verify whether the target user’s social action status is controlled. CTL-DIFF achieves state-of-the-art control performance with a minimum budget, comparing with five baselines based on edge centrality strategies on four real-world datasets. We extend the diffusion control from user-level to global-level, comparing with four baselines on three datasets. Experimental results show that CTL-DIFF can effectively control information diffusion in the global social network by identifying and controlling the most influential users.