Community structure-regulation coupling reveals optimal information diffusion

Abstract Effective regulation of information diffusion in complex social systems requires balancing containment and intervention cost, yet how network community structure interacts with targeted interventions remains unclear. We develop a community structure-regulation coupling framework (COSREF) that integrates community structure with process-level regulation of transmission and show how their interplay governs diffusion. Tuning two regulation parameters governing within- and cross-community transmission yields three regimes: no, localized, and global diffusion, separated by abrupt transitions. This structure–regulation perspective reveals a low-cost intervention region where small, targeted adjustments contain spread, unifies topology and regulation within a single theoretical setting, and provides general principles for efficiently and robustly regulating modular systems. Analyses of large cross-platform real-world social networks confirm our analytical predictions and simulation results, demonstrating COSREF’s robustness across investigated topologies and its applicability to real information environments.