Upcoming Event: PhD Dissertation Defense

Modeling and Control of Misinformation Propagation in Social Networks

Yigit Ege Bayiz, ECE Ph.D Candidate

Abstract

Misinformation cascades through online social networks faster and more broadly than the truth, confusing users, hardening false beliefs, and polarizing communities. This dissertation develops engineering methods for modeling, controlling, and measuring the spread of misinformation in social networks, organized around an arc that engages progressively with its origins. We first treat misinformation as a contagion to be contained, casting its prevention as a control problem over a model of propagation and developing a suite of interventions—structural alterations to the network, optimally timed prebunking, and credibility-aware feed re-ranking—that limit its spread without classifying or removing content. We then relax the assumption that the sources of misinformation are passive, modeling its production as the outcome of strategic competition over public opinion, and show that the resulting game-theoretic equilibria reproduce behavior observed in real information landscapes and reveal the conditions under which misinformation gains a competitive advantage. Finally, we develop methods to measure two of the drivers these models assume—the susceptibility of audiences and the polarization of sources—at finer resolution than existing aggregate measures allow. Together, these methods move the point of intervention upstream, from the spread of misinformation toward the competition and drivers that generate it.

Biography

Yigit Ege Bayiz is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dr. Ufuk Topcu. He holds dual B.S. degrees in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and Mathematics from Bilkent University and an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UT Austin. His research applies control theory, game theory, and machine learning to the modeling, control, and measurement of misinformation in social networks.