Data from: Competing opinion diffusion on social networks

Opinion competition is a common phenomenon in real life, such as opinions on controversial issues or political candidates, however modeling the competition remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a model of competing opinion diffusion on social networks taking into account the degree-dependent fitness or persuasiveness.We study the combined influence of social networks, individual fitnesses and attributes, as well as mass media on people’s opinions, and find that both social networks and mass media act as amplifier in opinion diffusion for which the amplifying effect can be quantitatively characterized. We analytically obtain the probability that each opinion will ultimately pervade the whole society when there are no committed people in networks, and the final proportion of each opinion at the steady state when there are committed people in networks. The results of numerical simulations show good agreement with those obtained through analytical approach. This study provides insight into the collective influence of individual attributes, local social networks and global media on opinion diffusion, and contributes to a comprehensive understanding of competing diffusion behaviors in real world.

舆论竞争是现实生活中常见的现象，例如针对争议性议题或政治候选人的观点博弈，然而迄今针对该竞争过程的建模研究仍未得到充分探索。为填补这一研究空白，我们提出一种社交网络上的竞争舆论扩散模型，该模型纳入了度依赖的适配度或说服力。我们探究了社交网络、个体适配度与属性，以及大众媒体对民众观点的综合影响，研究发现社交网络与大众媒体均可作为舆论扩散的放大器，其放大效应可被定量刻画。在网络中不存在坚定立场个体的场景下，我们通过解析推导得到了每种观点最终席卷整个社会的概率；而当网络中存在坚定立场个体时，我们推导得到了稳态下各观点的最终占比。数值模拟结果与解析方法得到的结论高度吻合。本研究揭示了个体属性、局部社交网络与全局媒体对舆论扩散的集体影响机制，有助于全面理解现实世界中的竞争扩散行为。