Robust Opinion Control Under Network Perturbation

Abstract

Online social networks connect people together and facilitate them to share their experiences and thoughts, while they also enable users with extreme opinions to further publicize their opinions and influence others. Thus, it is critical to study users' opinion formation process and to design effective mechanisms to control the opinion dynamics in social networks. In this work, we consider the scenario where users with extreme opinions may change the network structure, e.g., by adding new links or tuning the edge weights, to further spread their opinions to the public, and theoretically analyze its impact on the network opinions at equilibrium. We also propose a robust opinion control scheme that can reduce the influence of such network structure perturbation on network opinions. Simulations verify the correctness of our analysis and the effectiveness of our proposed opinion control algorithm.