Opinion Formation Modelling in Online Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) offer people to participate in discussion on different issues to form opinions. This opinion formation process is governed by various social influences. Opinion supported by majority population and experts’ opinions are two such major influencing factors. Moreover, in OSNs, people are exposed to numerous online sources’ opinions. Trust relationships also determines extents of influence on each other’s opinions. This research addresses these issues, and proposes models that can emulate the real-world opinion formation processes in OSNs. A framework to measure OSN user trustworthiness is also devised. Simulations and Twitter data are used for validating the models.