Social Networks are increasingly being used for a wide range of functions but the prime one continues to be the dissemination of information. Unfortunately, recent events have shown that such a platform can be used to spread fake news just as easily as factual news and this can result in significant social harm. In fact it has been shown that fake news, which tends to be sensationalized, spreads faster than factual information. We discuss the problem and present some of our ongoing work in the area. We describe the influence maximization problem and its use in advertising in social networks. Next we discuss appropriate models of influence between friends. We then discuss the use of trust models for increasing the quality of crowdsourced data. Finally we explore the connection between these two efforts on user influence and user trust.
If these issues are properly understood then we believe that one can increase the social good being extracted from social networks.