A survey of twitter rumor spreading simulations

Abstract

Viral marketing, marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks, has experienced a significant encouragement in the last years. In this scope, Twitter is the most studied social network in viral marketing and the rumor spread is a widely researched problem. This paper contributes with a survey of research works which study rumor diffusion in Twitter. Moreover, the most useful aspects of these works to build new multi-agent based simulations dealing with this interesting and complex problem are discussed. The main four research lines in rumor dissemination found and discussed in this paper are: exploratory data analysis, rumor detection, epidemiological modeling, and multiagent based social simulation. The survey shows that the reproducibility in the specialized literature has to be considerably improved. Finally, a free and open-source simulation tool implementing several of the models considered in this survey is presented.