Topological evolution of the internet public opinion

Ying Lian, Xuefan Dong and Yijun Liu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2017, vol. 486, issue C, 567-578

Abstract: The Internet forms a platform featured with high liquidity, accessibility and concealment for the public to express their respective views on certain events, thus leading to a large network graph. Due to such environmental features, the public opinions formed on the Internet are different from those on traditional media. Studies focusing on the former area are relatively fewer. In addition, the majority of existing methods proposed for constructing the Internet public opinion topological structure are based on the classic BA model, thus resulting in drawbacks in the range of simplicity and a lack of strict deduction. Therefore, based on the complex networks theory, a model applied to describe the topology of the Internet public opinion is deduced with rigorous derivation in the present paper. Results show that the proposed expression could well reflect the degree distribution of Internet public opinion which follows an analogous power law distribution, and that the peak value and the degree distribution are not correlative to each other. Moreover, it has been also proved that compared to the classic BA model, the proposed model has better accuracy performance in the description of the degree distribution of the Internet public opinion, which contributes to future studies focusing on this area. Thus, an attempt has been made to give the first theoretical description of the Internet public opinion topology in the present paper. In addition, it is also the first paper focusing on the solution of networks degree distribution with an exponential growth form.

Keywords: Internet public opinion; Degree distribution; Exponential growth rule; Topological evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:486:y:2017:i:c:p:567-578

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.05.034

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