A psychologically-inspired fuzzy-based approach for user personality prediction in rumor propagation across social networks

Social networks have emerged as a fertile ground for the spread of rumors and misinformation in recent times. The increased rate of social networking owes to the popularity of social networks among the common people and user personality has been considered as a principal component in predicting individuals’ social media usage patterns. Several studies have been conducted to study the psychological factors influencing the social network usage of people but only a few works have explored the relationship between the user’s personality and their orientation to spread rumors. This research aims to investigate the effect of personality on rumor spread on social networks. In this work, we propose a psychologically-inspired fuzzy-based approach grounded on the Five-Factor Model of behavioral theory to analyze the behavior of people who are highly involved in rumor diffusion and categorize users into the susceptible and resistant group, based on their inclination towards rumor sharing. We conducted our experiments in almost 825 individuals who shared rumor tweets on Twitter related to five different events. Our study ratifies the truth that the personality traits of individuals play a significant role in rumor dissemination and the experimental results prove that users exhibiting a high degree of agreeableness trait are more engaged in rumor sharing activities and the users high in extraversion and openness trait restrain themselves from rumor propagation.