Fake news propagation in online social networks (OSN) is one of the critical societal threats nowadays directing attention to fake news mitigation and intervention techniques. One of the typical mitigation techniques focus on initiating news mitigation campaigns targeting a specific set of users when the infected set of users is known or targeting the entire network when the infected set of users is unknown. The contemporary mitigation techniques assume the campaign users’ acceptance to share a mitigation news (MN); however, in reality, user behavior is different. This paper focuses on devising a generic mitigation framework, where the social crowd can be employed to combat the influence of fake news in OSNs when the infected set of users is undefined. The framework is composed of three major phases: facts discovery, facts searching and, community recommendation. Mitigation news circulation is accomplished by recruiting a set of social crowd users (news propagators) who are likely to accept posting the mitigation news article. We propose a set of features that identify prospect OSN audiences and news propagators. Moreover, we inspect the variant properties of the news circulation process, such as incentivizing news propagators, determining the required number of news propagators, and the adaptivity of the MN circulation process. The paper pinpoints the significance of facts searching and news propagator’s behavior features introduced in the experimental results.

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