Search

The 21st century has redefined the way we communicate, our concept of individual and group privacy, and the dynamics of acceptable behavioral norms. The messaging dynamics on Twitter, an internet social network, has opened new ways/modes of spreading information. As a result cyberbullying or in general, the spread of offensive messages, is a prevalent problem. The aim of this report is to identify and evaluate conditions that would dampen the role of cyberbullying dynamics on Twitter. We present a discrete-time non-linear compartmental model to explore how the introduction of a Quarantine class may help to hinder the spread of offensive messages. We based the parameters of this model on recent Twitter data related to a topic that communities would deem most offensive, and found that for Twitter a level of quarantine can always be achieved that will immediately suppress the spread of offensive messages, and that this level of quarantine is independent of the number of offenders spreading the message. We hope that the analysis of this dynamic model will shed some insights into the viability of new models of methods for reducing cyberbullying in public social networks.