PONE-D-24-02968Digital cloning of online social networks for language-sensitive agent-based modeling of misinformation spreadPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Puri,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 29 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Matteo Cinelli

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.

Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”).

For additional information about PLOS ONE ethical requirements for human subjects research, please refer to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research.

3. We note that you have indicated that there are restrictions to data sharing for this study. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions.

Before we proceed with your manuscript, please address the following prompts:

a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., a Research Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board, etc.). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent.

b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of recommended repositories, please see

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories. You also have the option of uploading the data as Supporting Information files, but we would recommend depositing data directly to a data repository if possible.

We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide.

4. We notice that your supplementary figure is uploaded with the file type 'Figure'. Please amend the file type to 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list.

Additional Editor Comments:

The reviewers provided the comments for your paper. Overall, the decision is Major Revision

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors provide a valuable exertion towards more accurately modeling and understanding forward-looking misinformation scenarios. I acknowledge the effort of reconstructing the network of users engaged with a given source post. Furthermore, the authors employ a noteworthy number of steps and techniques to account for the tweet-level and user-level features in developing the infection model. Despite various dimensional reductions of embeddings and parameter approximations in estimating probabilities, the model performances are adequate. I appreciated that, as the authors pointed out: "We notice only very slight performance degradation across time, suggesting Period I-II user behavior encoded during the training process remains relevant to user information sharing tendencies for multiple months", displaying a stable value of the FPR through time, despite a degree of overfitting between the training and test sets. I would interpret the latter as a further robustness check of the training procedure, along with its implication from an interpretative point-of-view of stable users' inclination regarding information consumption. This outcome is consistent with the results reported in Fig. 6A and 6B, where the authors anew highlighted that "most of the variation in virality explained by the ABM is attributable to user-level features; however, the ABM still does demonstrate a degree of text sensitivity when user-level features are fixed." I would suggest emphasizing more these outcomes in terms of the model's validity and their implications from an interpretative point of view in misinformation countermeasure evaluation. Finally, I would add a column with the number of posts for each community in Table S1.

Overall, I think this is a very well written and carried-out work, and I recommend this paper for publication.

Reviewer #2: This paper proposes a new model for studying the spreading of misinformation on online social media.

Different from previous works, the authors considered a Machine Learning framework that computes infection probabilities based on communities, users and topicsof discussion. Moreover, they used LLMs to predict how information changes during its transmission (i.e. users sharing posts on Twitter may align differently from the original poster).

The authors also tested their models with real data and provided some possible applications of it.

Although the results are interesting and promising, I think that some aspects need to be revised and some further analysis should be done. Here I provide a detailed list of my concerns:

- the paper uses a "cloned" network obtained starting from a post chosen by the authors. Although they explain why they chose that post, I think that it is necessary to add the analysis and the results for at least one other network to check the robustness and validity of the model;

- Line 119-120, the authors say they selected the 10000 most active users, measured with the in-degree of the node (i.e. how many times the user shares a post of another). My concern here is the following: consider a network in which node v has a high in-degree, but its neighbour is composed of user with low in-degree (similar to a star pointing to v). Thus, they are deleted in the filtered network G. In this way, node v is part of G, but its "activity" is highly underestimated because all its neighbour neighbours have disappeared. This is a possible problematic case that can arise but, in general, I think that the activity should be measured differently. Maybe both the in- and out-degree of nodes should be considered to measure activity. Moreover, I suggest to add some simple statistics of the network (edge density, degree distribution, etc.);

- Line 136-137, the authors say that in Fig1A the edge thickness is proportional to the number of follower-followee between the two communities. However, in Line 121-122 it is written they didn't extract the relation followee-follower.

Could you explain better?

- Line 168-189 (SEI Model Pseudocode), I found it hard to read due to the difficult-to-read notation. Moreover, it seems that some symbols are not defined. In particular:

1. Line 173: what is f(j)? Is t_j the time at which a user becomes infected? In case, please specify it better;

2. Line 177: I think you could simply say S(f_j) = S;

3. Line 179: (at least for me) it's very hard to read and interpret X(p = IP). Since it is a Bernoulli random variable,

please use a simpler notation;

In general, please check you defined everything you mention in the pseudocode.

- Line 193: The authors say that \\Delta is an arbitrary random variable, but I didn't find what type of distribution they use for it in the simulations. Please add some more details;

- Line 246: maybe you can add a citation to your sentence;

- Line 318-319: the authors mention correlation values that are not shown. Please add them in the Figure or in a separate table, together with their significance (e.g. p-values). Moreover, please specify what coefficient did you use and if correlations are computed on logged values instead of original;

- At the end of the discussion section, please add a paragraph about the limitations of the work. Although you mentioned some of them throughout the paper, I think it could be useful to provide a summary in the end.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Digital cloning of online social networks for language-sensitive agent-based modeling of misinformation spread

PONE-D-24-02968R1

Dear Dr. Prateek Puri,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Matteo Cinelli

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear Authors,

the reviewers recommended your article for publication.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors addressed all my comments adequately. I deem there are no other issues, and I recommend this paper for publication.

Reviewer #2: Thanks to the authors for having addressed all my previous comments.

I think that the work has been greatly improved and it is ready to be published.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********