Information Diffusion Model Based on Privacy Setting in Online Social Networking Services
Hongbo Zhu, Chongwen Huang, H. Li · The Computer Journal · 2014
Social networking service (SNS) is one of the major technological applications based on Web 2.0, which can help users to express their views and share information with others. How to describe the information diffusion process in online SNS accurately has attracted considerable interest recently. However, almost all existing models focus on a single online SNS tool and face many challenges with multiple online SNS tools. In this paper, we turn to users’ privacy setting policies and propose a general stochastic model with multiple diffusion mechanisms in online SNS, called DMPS. Specifically, we first define a privacy protection mechanism based on information sharing in online SNS and classify nodes according to different privacy setting policies; then, we define the states of the nodes and information dissemination rules with dynamics of infectious disease; finally, we describe the evolution process of different nodes by dynamic evolution equations. Detailed simulations and analysis show that the DMPS can precisely describe the diffusion process with multiple diffusion mechanisms and have the same characteristics as a diffusion process in real online SNS. As a result, DMPS can be used to identify the underlying diffusion mechanism of information and forecast its trend in online SNS.