Opinion Formation in Online Social Networks: Exploiting Predisposition, Interaction, and Credibility

Abstract

The challenging but intriguing problem of modeling opinion formation dynamics in online social networks (OSNs) has attracted many researchers in recent years because the inherent complexities present in human opinion update process are yet to be clearly understood. Although the existing works adopt the distance-based homophily principle to model the neighbors’ influences on the formation of an agent’s opinion, they ignore several other key factors that govern the update process. Explicitly, we consider two essential aspects of the real-world opinion formation process that were not explored previously. First, we consider the predisposition of agents that leads to selective exposure to information when presented with different opinion sources. Second, we explicitly consider an agent’s past interaction experience with others and how opinions encountered in the past interactions influence future opinion update process of that agent. Although the confidence level of an agent on the expressed opinion was previously used to distinguish an expert, we propose the concept of the relative credibility of the opinion sources for such distinction. For this, we take into account an agent’s perceived credibility about others and the relative nature of human judgment when exposed to many opinion sources with different credibility. In addition, for the first time, the credibility of sources external to an OSN is considered in the opinion formation model proposed in this paper. We validate our model by analyzing its performance in capturing the real-world opinion formation dynamics using traces collected from an OSN, specifically Twitter. On the other hand, through simulation, various scenarios are created to observe the steady-state outcomes of the dynamics under various influences of our model parameters and network characteristics. Finally, different compelling and practical applications with social and economic values can be built based on our model.