A Novel Model for Rumor Spreading on Social Networks with Considering the Influence of Dissenting Opinions

Rumor spreading is a good sample of spreading in which human beings are the main players in the spreading process. Therefore, in order to have a more realistic model of rumor spreading on online social networks, the influence of psycho-sociological factors particularly those which affect users' reactions toward rumor/anti-rumor should be considered. To this aim, we present a new model that considers the influence of dissenting opinions on those users who have already believed in rumor/anti-rumor but have not spread the rumor/anti-rumor yet. We hypothesize that influence is a motive for the believers to spread their beliefs in rumor/anti-rumor. We derive the stochastic equations of the new model and evaluate it by using two real datasets of rumor spreading on Twitter. The evaluation results support the new hypothesis and show that the novel model which is relied on the new hypothesis is able to better represent rumor spreading.