Absence of influential spreaders in rumor dynamics

TL;DR

This paper challenges the idea that coreness identifies influential spreaders in rumor dynamics, showing instead that it prevents widespread diffusion, with implications for social contagion understanding and viral marketing.

Contribution

It demonstrates through simulations that in rumor spreading, a node's k-core index does not indicate influence but rather inhibits rumor spread, contrasting prior disease spreading studies.

Findings

Node influence in rumor spreading is not linked to k-core index.

High k-core nodes tend to prevent rumor diffusion.

Results have implications for social contagion and viral marketing strategies.

Abstract

Recent research [1] has suggested that coreness, and not degree, constitutes a better topological descriptor to identifying influential spreaders in complex networks. This hypothesis has been verified in the context of disease spreading. Here, we instead focus on rumor spreading models, which are more suited for social contagion and information propagation. To this end, we perform extensive computer simulations on top of several real-world networks and find opposite results. Namely, we show that the spreading capabilities of the nodes do not depend on their $k$-core index, which instead determines whether or not a given node prevents the diffusion of a rumor to a system-wide scale. Our findings are relevant both for sociological studies of contagious dynamics and for the design of efficient commercial viral processes.