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.观点竞争是现实生活中的常见现象，例如围绕争议性议题或政治候选人的观点博弈，但针对该竞争过程的建模研究仍在很大程度上未得到充分探索。为填补这一研究空白，我们提出了社交网络场景下的竞争观点扩散模型，该模型纳入了与节点度相关的个体适配性（或说服力）。我们探究了社交网络、个体适配性与属性，以及大众媒体对公众观点的综合影响，发现社交网络与大众媒体均可作为观点扩散的放大器，其放大效应可被定量刻画。通过解析推导，我们得到了两种情形下的结果：当网络中无立场坚定的个体时，每种观点最终传遍全社会的概率；当网络中存在立场坚定的个体时，每种观点在稳态下的最终占比。数值模拟结果与解析方法所得结果吻合度极佳。本研究揭示了个体属性、局域社交网络与全域媒体对观点扩散的协同影响，有助于全面理解现实世界中的竞争扩散行为。