The impact of broadcasting on the spread of opinions in social media conversations

We extend our earlier work by focusing on broadcasting opinions (one-to-many interactions) alongside narrowcasts (one-to-one interactions) in social media conversations taking explicitly into consideration the behavioral characteristics of agents and the properties of the underlying network. In particular, we construct a generalized model for the spread of influence through broadcast and narrowcast interactions on social media discussion sites, and implement an agent-based model to develop insights regarding the effects of broadcasting. Our preliminary experiments show that increased broadcasting (in terms of frequency, depth, and number of broadcasters) increases homogeneity in an evolving scale-free network.