Competitive Influence Blocking in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on WeChat

Rapid development of online social networks further facilitates the expansion of information over the Internet. In many scenarios, several pieces of different or even opposite information could diffuse competitively at the same time. Recently, some messenger APPs such as WeChat arose, where users can send links in their "WeChat Moments (WM)", which is called the messenger-based social network (Msg-SN). The unique characteristics in Msg-SN may lead to great difference on the network topology compared to conventional social networks. It is impossible to find the key opinion leaders with millions of followers to help block the rumors or to locate the source of rumors. Thus, the business often tries to select and inject a set of users in the network with the truth to block negative influence diffusion. We call this problem as the competitive influence blocking (CIB) problem. In this paper, we study the CIB problem in Msg-SN under the competitive linear threshold (CLT) model. We propose a fast heuristic algorithm based on eigenvector centrality to optimize the negative influence reduction by selecting a positive seed set. The experimental results using real-world WeChat Moments data show that our algorithm performs better than the effective CLDAG algorithm and also runs faster.