Abstract
Social media has blurred the distinction between news outlets and social networks by giving everyone access to mass communication. We simulate how influencers compete for attention on a social network by spreading information. The network structure occupies an ordered metastable state where one influencer maintains dominance for a sustained period or a fragmented state that divides attention between influencers. Numerical simulations are performed to map the domain of the ordered regime on various network topologies. Mutual coexistence between a few dominating influencers occurs on a scale-free social network. Our findings suggest the perception of fake news as a pervasive problem is endemic to a society where everyone can become a news outlet.
Highlights
Social contagion processes have been simulated with local and reciprocal interactions between neighbors in a connected graph [1,2,3,4,5]
Ordinary people can communicate with unlimited subscribers, something previously reserved for news corporations
We argue that users in a social network are effectively news outlets, varying in size and impact
Summary
We simulate how influencers compete for attention on a social network by spreading information. The capacity to interact with many is a defining property of the information age The nature of this interaction is not reciprocal but directed; a collection of subscribers can receive information from a news outlet or an influencer, but there is no mutual exchange of information. We simulate the emerging dynamics of a social network where any node can become an influencer and collect followers by sharing information. Our model integrates local reciprocal interactions between neighbors in a social network and global directed interactions between influencers and subscribers. Consider a static undirected social network where nodes can be either followers or influencers. Influencers update the news value of their subscribers to t upon discovering a news event.
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