Role of lurkers in threshold-driven information spreading dynamics

Zhongyuan Ruan, Bin Yu, Xiyun Zhang, and Qi Xuan
Phys. Rev. E 104, 034308 – Published 21 September 2021

Abstract

The threshold model as a classical paradigm for studying information spreading processes has been well studied. The main focuses are on how the underlying social network structure or the size of initial seeds can affect the cascading dynamics. However, the influence of node characteristics has been largely ignored. Here, inspired by empirical observations, we extend the threshold model by taking into account lurking nodes, who rarely interact with their neighbors. In particular, we consider two different scenarios: (i) Lurkers are absolutely silent and never interact with others and (ii) lurkers intermittently interact with their neighborhood with an activity rate p. In the first case, we demonstrate that lurkers may reduce the effective average degree of the underlying network, playing a dual role in spreading dynamics. In the latter case, we find that the stochastic dynamic behavior of lurkers could significantly promote the spread of information. Concretely, slightly raising the activity rate p of lurkers may result in a remarkable increase in the final cascade size. Further increasing p could make nodes become more stable on average, while it is still easy to observe global cascades due to the fluctuations of the effective degree of nodes.

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  • Received 23 November 2020
  • Revised 25 May 2021
  • Accepted 9 September 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.104.034308

©2021 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
Networks

Authors & Affiliations

Zhongyuan Ruan1,*, Bin Yu1, Xiyun Zhang2, and Qi Xuan1

  • 1Institute of Cyberspace Security, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China
  • 2Department of Physics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510632, China

  • *zyruan@zjut.edu.cn

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Issue

Vol. 104, Iss. 3 — September 2021

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