  The growing reliance on social media for news consumption necessitates
effective countermeasures to mitigate the rapid spread of misinformation.
Prebunking, a proactive method that arms users with accurate information before
they come across false content, has garnered support from journalism and
psychology experts. We formalize the problem of optimal prebunking as
optimizing the timing of delivering accurate information, ensuring users
encounter it before receiving misinformation while minimizing the disruption to
user experience. Utilizing a susceptible-infected epidemiological process to
model the propagation of misinformation, we frame optimal prebunking as a
policy synthesis problem with safety constraints. We then propose a policy that
approximates the optimal solution to a relaxed problem. The experiments show
that this policy cuts the user experience cost of repeated information delivery
in half, compared to delivering accurate information immediately after
identifying a misinformation propagation.

Social and Information Networks;Systems and Control;Systems and Control