Agent-Based Modeling of Netizen Groups in Chinese Internet Events

摘要

Internet events are public events with the participation of netizens to express their opinions or comments. As an emerging phenomenon, Internet events often draw nationwide attention and eventually influence offline events. Netizen groups who participate in the Internet events play a central role in such events. In this paper, we focus on the study of netizen groups and propose an agent-based model to capture their dynamics and evolvement in Internet events. Our experiment is based on two case studies of Chinese Internet events. We test the proposed model by running simulations and comparing experimental results with real social media data to show the effectiveness of our model.