Spread mechanism and control strategy of social network rumors under the influence of COVID-19

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19), the disease has rapidly spread to the world, and the cumulative number of cases is now more than 2.3 million. We aim to study the spread mechanism of rumors on social network platform during the spread of COVID-19 and consider education as a control measure of the spread of rumors. Firstly, a novel epidemic-like model is established to characterize the spread of rumor, which depends on the nonautonomous partial differential equation. Furthermore, the registration time of network users is abstracted as ‘age,’ and the spreading principle of rumors is described from two dimensions of age and time. Specifically, the susceptible users are divided into higher-educators class and lower-educators class, in which the higher-educators class will be immune to rumors with a higher probability and the lower-educators class is more likely to accept and spread the rumors. Secondly, the existence and uniqueness of the solution is discussed and the stability of steady-state solution of the model is obtained. Additionally, an interesting conclusion is that the education level of the crowd is an essential factor affecting the final scale of the spread of rumors. Finally, some control strategies are presented to effectively restrain the rumor propagation, and numerical simulations are carried out to verify the main theoretical results.