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Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Opinion dynamics is a central subject of computational social science, and various models have been developed to understand the evolution and formulation of opinions. Existing models mainly focus on opinion dynamics on graphs that only…
Popularity dynamics in social media depend on a complex interplay of social influence between users and popularity-based recommendations that are provided by the platforms. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time dynamical system to…
Most of the conventional models for opinion dynamics mainly account for a fully local influence, where myopic agents decide their actions after they interact with other agents that are adjacent to them. For example, in the case of social…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
We study the evolution of opinions on a directed network with community structure. Individuals update their opinions synchronously based on a weighted average of their neighbors' opinions, their own previous opinions, and external media…
In this paper, we study how to shape opinions in social networks when the matrix of interactions is unknown. We consider classical opinion dynamics with some stubborn agents and the possibility of continuously influencing the opinions of a…
Many social phenomena are triggered by public opinion that is formed in the process of opinion exchange among individuals. To date, from the engineering point of view, a large body of work has been devoted to studying how to manipulate…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
This paper studies the formation of final opinions for the Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model with a community of partially stubborn agents. The underlying network of the FJ model is symmetric and generated from a random graph model, in which each…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
We propose a setting for two-phase opinion dynamics in social networks, where a node's final opinion in the first phase acts as its initial biased opinion in the second phase. In this setting, we study the problem of two camps aiming to…
Online social networks (OSNs) have transformed the way individuals fulfill their social needs and consume information. As OSNs become increasingly prominent sources for news dissemination, individuals often encounter content that influences…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
The ability of a small set of coordinated actors to manipulate opinions in online social networks poses a serious challenge to the fairness and integrity of public debate. We investigate this problem by studying how targeted stubborn agents…
Among different aspects of social networks, dynamics have been proposed to simulate how opinions can be transmitted. In this study, we propose a model that simulates the communication in an online social network, in which the posts are…
Leadership in social groups is often a dynamic characteristic that emerges from interactions and opinion exchange. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals with strong opinions tend to gain influence, at the same time maintaining…
Unlike many complex networks studied in the literature, social networks rarely exhibit unanimous behavior, or consensus. This requires a development of mathematical models that are sufficiently simple to be examined and capture, at the same…
We investigate the novel problem of voting-based opinion maximization in a social network: Find a given number of seed nodes for a target campaigner, in the presence of other competing campaigns, so as to maximize a voting-based score for…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…