Consistency driven opinion formation modelling in presence of external sources

Opinion formation in social networks has changed in a more rigorous way due to the inception of Online Social Networks (OSNs) as a platform of generating and sharing huge amount of contents as well as easy and ubiquitous access to varied information sources. Our opinions are not only updated through interactions with our neighbours in OSNs, but also shaped by the opinions received from information sources external to the native OSNs. Current models only consider the neighbours´ influence in opinion evolution, thus lack the impact of other information sources, e.g., news media, Web search, bulletin board, discussion forum on opinion formation. They consider individual opinion distances to model the influence among interactive neighbours, but fail to capture the influence of majority supported opinions and its possible impact in opinion evolution. Our model explicitly captures the effect of external sources on opinion formation in an OSN. We combine the implication of most perceived opinions in terms of consistency along with opinion distance to emulate the influence of different opinion sources. Consistency is measured by the entropy of opinions derived from a particular source type. Simulation results show that our model properly captures the consensus, polarization and fragmentation properties of opinion evolution. Finally, we investigate the influence of stubborn agents on opinion formation and compare it with a contemporary model.