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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.