IPSR Model: Misinformation Intervention through Prebunking in Social Systems

Abstract: In the present digital world, the rapid spread of misinformation is not just an annoyance but a real threat to public safety, and our collective decision-making. Prebunking, a type of psychological immunization, can educate people about misinformation and lay a foundation of cognitive resilience that makes them more robust against future misinformation. We use a compartmental modeling approach inspired by vaccination models from epidemiology to model the effectiveness of prebunking misinformation. Populations are classified into different compartments based on the exposure to prebunking and the propagation of misinformation through online social networks. Specific rates dictate the transitions between such states, similar to how people traverse between susceptible, infected, and recovered compartments in classical epidemiological models. This model integrates different levels of prebunking potency, the fraction of the population prebunked initially, and the forgetting rate effects. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work which study the extent of prebunking interventions to reduce the scale of misinformation, much as vaccinations curtail the spread of infectious diseases.