Social Bots and Information Propagation in Social Networks: Simulating Cooperative and Competitive Interaction Dynamics

Abstract

With the acceleration of human society’s digitization and the application of innovative technologies to emerging media, popular social media platforms are inundated by fresh news and multimedia content from multiple more or less reliable sources. This abundance of circulating and accessible information and content has intensified the difficulty of separating good, real, and true information from bad, false, and fake information. As it has been proven, most unwanted content is created automatically using bots (automated accounts supported by artificial intelligence), and it is difficult for authorities and respective media platforms to combat the proliferation of such malicious, pervasive, and artificially intelligent entities. In this article, we propose using automated account (bots)-originating content to compete with and reduce the speed of propagating a harmful rumor on a given social media platform by modeling the underlying relationship between the circulating contents when they are related to the same topic and present relative interest for respective online communities using differential equations and dynamical systems. We studied the proposed model qualitatively and quantitatively and found that peaceful coexistence could be obtained under certain conditions, and improving the controlled social bot’s content attractiveness and visibility has a significant impact on the long-term behavior of the system depending on the control parameters.