Mitigating Misinformation Spread on Blockchain Enabled Social Media Networks

Abstract: The paper develops a blockchain protocol for a social media network (BE-SMN) to mitigate the spread of misinformation. BE-SMN is derived based on the information transmission-time distribution by modeling the misinformation transmission as double-spend attacks on blockchain. The misinformation distribution is then incorporated into the SIR (Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered) model, which substitutes the single rate parameter in the traditional SIR model. Then, on a multi-community network, we study the propagation of misinformation numerically and show that the proposed blockchain enabled social media network outperforms the baseline network in flattening the curve of the infected population.