Public Authority Control Strategy For Opinion Evolution On Social Networks

If social rumor and negative extreme opinion can't be stopped in time, it will have significant influence on people's living environment and social order. So when the public opinion with negative effect on society appears, strategy should be taken timely to make the right direction and let the public opinion evolution to the right direction. Now, all kinds of social events triggered by public opinion has taken the attention from governments and people from all kinds of fields, they pay more attention to the process of public opinion and guidance measures. Under the background of society and individual heterogeneity in all aspects, how to guide and control public opinion through minimum strength in a short time is now an urgent problem need to study.Existing public control strategies include degree control, random control, and adaptive bridge control. But these control strategies are mainly focused on the network topology and rarely focus on the individual's own properties. Based on the above social phenomenon and social background, this paper puts forward a new control strategy for controlling public opinion——Public authority control strategy based on public authority, which takes the individual heterogeneity into account among social real individuals. The opinions of individuals with high authority are controlled to obtain the optimum effect in the shortest time possible and thus reach a consensus of public opinion. Public authority(PA) is only influenced by an individual's attributes(age, economic status, education level) and is not related to the individual's degree distribution. We assume that PA complies with two kinds of distribution of public authority(normal distribution and power-law distribution). According to the proposed control strategy, we design an experiment based on random, degree, and public authority control strategies in three different social networks(small-world, scale-free, and random networks) and then compare and analyze the three control strategies in terms of convergence time(T), final number of controlled agents(C), and comprehensive efficiency(E).The experiment results shows that different network topologies and the distribution of the PA in the network can influence the final controlling effect. The effect of public authority strategy differs in different network topology structures. However, all network topology structures achieve comprehensive efficiency with any kind of public authority distribution in any network, particularly in the small-world network when the public authority is in accordance with power-law distribution. This finding is consistent with several current sociological phenomena. Hence, in the social process of public opinion or rumor control, considerable attention should be paid to individuals with high authority.