Identification and role of opinion leaders in information diffusion for online discussion network

Social networks are playing a vibrant role in spreading information among its users. With the ongoing boom in technology, social networks are becoming very popular nowadays and are made up of a multitude of users. Some of these users may have a strong influence on the other network users depending on their uncommon elevated values of betweenness centrality (BC). In the online discussion network such as Twitter, the extremely important users are called Opinion Leaders, who play a vital role in the spread of information in an efficient and fast way and keep the isolates interested in the online discussion network. One of the most significant problems in the associated sector is the identification of opinion leaders. In this paper, opinion leaders are chosen based on various centrality measures. The central users are identified based on their in-degree and out-degree links and are ranked within the network by their BC values. Furthermore, we analyze community evolution by using the standard Louvain algorithm. The experiment is performed on publicly available Higgs Boson data from Twitter. The conversation starter and influencer have been observed as an opinion leader for each network. These users have been observed to play a crucial part in the dissemination of information in an online discussion network.

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