Influence and Extension of the Spiral of Silence in Social Networks: A Data-Driven Approach

The Spiral of Silence has been studied widely in the traditional propagation field. However, to our best knowledge, no one has clearly verified the Spiral of Silence in social networks based on the real information diffusion data. In this paper, four factors including width, depth, message sentiment, and modularity of information diffusion trees are analyzed to verify the applicability of the theory. Disparities between majority and minority are found to different extents in various topics. Based on Spiral of Silence, polarity prediction of users’ review without considering the semantic meaning of content is proposed and discovered. The results indicate that opinions of people in propagation are impacted by social environment and their friends. The Anti-Spiral of Silence, an extension of Spiral of Silence, has been found to play a significant role in leading rational public opinion and revealing truth in social networks. Our works of both Spiral of Silence and Anti-Spiral of Silence will enrich research results on the study and application of propagation effects.