Dynamics of multi-campaign propagation in online social networks

Abstract

Ever since the advent of online social networking, people have been voluntarily posting and consuming information on the web. This new method to communicate digitally provides the means to spread information considerably far in a very short span of time with minimal resources. Social networks are increasingly being used to spread misinformation online due to low-costs in organizing grassroots of these campaigns. Our goal in this paper is to determine the efficiency with which campaigns can succeed in an online social network, efficiency represents the ease with which a campaign can triumph over other competing campaigns in a network. We model the information diffusion using Multi-Campaign Independent Cascade Model, and by applying node coercion and link cutting as campaign limiting strategies we ascertain how efficiently a campaign can succeed. The efficiency measure tackles the problem of determining the survivability of campaigns, which is used to ensure success or failure of a campaign using campaign limiting strategies.