Prediction and Analysis of Rumour's Impact on Social Media

Rumour, as an important form of social communication, has been run through the whole evolutionary history of mankind. People maliciously disseminate rumours in order to increase awareness, slander others or cause panic, etc. To eliminate this issue, many researchers resort to detecting rumours on social media. However, rumour detection is not sufficient to eliminate the negative impact, which also requires official institutions to provide the refutations. In practice, the number of rumours on social media is too large, there is no need to refute some rumours with little or no concern. Therefore, we need to evaluate the impact of the rumours in advance. In this paper, we devise a rumour influence prediction model RISM (Rumour Impact on Social Media) based on a popular rumour intensity formula to predict the impact of a newborn rumour. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out on the real rumour data that are collected from Toutiao.com, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RISM model.