Effective immunization strategy for rumor propagation based on maximum spanning tree

Trust between users in social network plays an important role on information diffusion, rumor propagation and social recommendations. Therefore, considering the universality and negative influence of rumors, it is crucial to look into the trust in detail among social network users when try to design effective immunization strategies for rumor propagation. In this study, we build a weighted trust network, in which the strength of tie refers to trust among users. Based on the weighted trust network, we further propose an immunization strategy (called MST Immunization) concerning maximum spanning tree. By simulation and empirical experiments, we compare the MST immunization strategy with random strategy and targeted strategy. The results show that this new immunization strategy achieves high immunization performance and better maintaining of network connectivity.