Rumor detection on social networks focusing on endogenous psychological motivation

Emerging information acquisition methods represented by social networks are increasingly popular. The freedom and concealment make social media become the main platform for rumor spreading. Rumor detection has attracted the attention of both academia and industry, and a series of rumor detection methods have emerged. However, existing methods focus on modeling exogenous features such as text content and user characteristics, while ignoring the endogenous psychological motivation of users. Sociological and psychological researches on rumor have demonstrated the correlation between the endogenous psychology of users and their behavior in social networks. Therefore, this study focuses on the intrinsic psychological motivation of users, probes the psychological changes of users after they are exposed to rumors from the perspectives of active sharing and passive response, analyzes and judges user behaviors to explore an efficient rumor detection method. Among them, active sharing behavior is based on the investigation of social users' motivation, decision making and goal setting, and is related to users' motivation to actively participate in content by creating posts and so on. Passive response, which is closely related to personal emotions originating from the influence of external factors, is a study of users' cognitive processes and is associated with the way they handle information without active participation. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in rumor detection tasks, improving accuracy by 2.1% over the current baseline on the Twitter16 dataset and enabling early detection of rumors as they emerge.