Analysing the evolution of contrary opinions on a controversial network event

Abstract

With the growing popularity of social networking services, network public opinion gradually plays an important role in social life. When a controversial network event happens, what people concern about is which opinion in the contrary opinions will be widely accepted by people and how long this event lasts. To solve this problem, we propose a social evolutionary game model based on Hawk-Dove game to simulate how contrary opinions evolve in social network. The effectiveness of our model is validated by actual data. This model can be used to estimate the potential dominant opinion group and the time length of the controversy. Besides, our simulation reveals some special features of the evolution process and results. This study may be useful for network public opinion supervision and market research.