An Efficient Hybrid Control Strategy for Restraining Rumor Spreading.

Toward combating the malicious rumor spreading on online social networks, we discuss a hybrid control strategy that combines a continuous truth spreading method and an impulsive rumor blocking method in this article. In this strategy, the truth is introduced as an anti-rumor to compete with the rumor while the rumor-infected users would be quarantined with a limited isolation period. The stability of the rumor-free equilibrium of the rumor-truth propagation system is analyzed and conditions to reach uniform asymptotic stability as well as global exponential stability are obtained. For the endemic case, the conditions under which rumor would persist uniformly are obtained. An optimal hybrid control problem is formulated to address the tradeoff between restraining rumor and minimizing the cost of control. The necessary conditions for optimal system and the structure of optimal hybrid control are obtained. Numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the theoretical results and evaluate the potential roles of the hybrid control strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]