Influence Minimization Under Budget and Matroid Constraints: Extended Version

Abstract: Recently, online social networks have become major battlegrounds for political campaigns, viral marketing, and the dissemination of news. As a consequence, ''bad actors'' are increasingly exploiting these platforms, becoming a key challenge for their administrators, businesses and the society in general. The spread of fake news is a classical example of the abuse of social networks by these actors. While some have advocated for stricter policies to control the spread of misinformation in social networks, this often happens in detriment of their democratic and organic structure. In this paper we study how to limit the influence of a target set of users in a network via the removal of a few edges. The idea is to control the diffusion processes while minimizing the amount of disturbance in the network structure. We formulate the influence limitation problem in a data-driven fashion, by taking into account past propagation traces. Moreover, we consider two types of constraints over the set of edge removals, a budget constraint and also a, more general, set of matroid constraints. These problems lead to interesting challenges in terms of algorithm design. For instance, we are able to show that influence limitation is APX-hard and propose deterministic and probabilistic approximation algorithms for the budgeted and matroid version of the problem, respectively. Our experiments show that the proposed solutions outperform the baselines by up to 40%.