Epidemic behavior of negative users in online social sites

With the increasing popularity of user-contributed sites, the phenomenon of "social" pollution, the presence of abusive posts has become increasingly prevalent. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to explain and predict negative behavior spreading dynamics in online social networks by us- ing well-known epidemic models. We show how using pure and hybrid models, it is possible not only to explain the phenomenon of abusiveness in certain online commentaries, but also that it is possible to predict these behavioral pat- terns with properly defined hybrid models. We summarize our results on a large set of experiments on Youtube com- mentaries, and show how the different epidemic patterns of behavior are tied to specific interaction patterns among users.