Social Influence Analysis (SIA) in Online Social Networks

Online social networks have become globally ubiquitous, and therefore are an arena where important social phenomena can be observed: e.g. diffusion of (dis)information, social and political polarization, as well as distribution of hate speech and radical content. To understand their spread and effects, it is important to analyze and model the notion of social influence in online networks. For empirical modeling, it is crucial to study the relational nature of interactions between users of the networks, together with analyzing the content of communications between them. This research focuses on investigating social influence in online social networks as the fundamental principle for information diffusion that needs to be modeled, parameterized, and measured. According to Google Scholar, in the first 5 months of 2022 alone, scholars from multiple disciplines roughly produced 30,000 papers dealing with the concept of influence in online social networks. This indicates that this research is indeed a multidisciplinary challenge.