Policy evaluation and analysis of choosing whom to tweet information on social media

Choosing whom to tweet information to promote information spread on social media is an interesting and significant topic for both academic and industrial areas. Effective policies to choose whom to tweet information on social media should make more users to be aware of the information and to be willing to retweet it. Aiming at investigating how information spreads on social media, this paper proposes an interest-based dissemination model to depict the information spread process. The interest is introduced as the foundation of users' rationality to follow other users and retweet information. Meanwhile, this paper adopts artificial society and a lightweight social computing method to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of policies, in which users on social media are modelled as agents with various social relationships and interests. Based on PZE approach, several policies for information promotion on social media have been made, and simulations are undertaken quantitatively to evaluate their effectiveness in various scenarios. The experimental results reveal that the effectiveness of a policy is tightly related to two kinds of users' rational behaviors: retweeting information and following other users.