From Cyber Space Opinion Leaders and the Spread of Anti-Vaccine Extremism to Physical Space Disease Outbreaks (1.2.0)
The main purpose of this model is to simulate how anti-vaccine opinion leaders in a scale-free network spread their extremism and how it creates anti-vaccine opinion clusters that causes disease outbreaks. The model provides a new way of modeling opinion dynamics and social influence by separating the cyber space and physical space. It identifies that the influence of anti-vaccine opinion leaders is two folded: (1) direct influence: this happens in the cyber space where the large amount of the followers receives information from opinion leaders and get influenced in certain degree; (2) indirect influence: in physical space, those who have been influenced by opinion leaders in cyber space carry such anti-vaccine sentiment and further have an impact in shaping opinions in their local communities. A disease transmission sub-model is applied after these two steps of extremism formation to test the degree of disease outbreaks cause by opinion clustering.
Release Notes
Associated Publications
This release is out-of-date. The latest version is
1.3.0
From Cyber Space Opinion Leaders and the Spread of Anti-Vaccine Extremism to Physical Space Disease Outbreaks 1.2.0
Submitted by
Xiaoyi Yuan
Published Mar 31, 2017
Last modified Feb 23, 2018
The main purpose of this model is to simulate how anti-vaccine opinion leaders in a scale-free network spread their extremism and how it creates anti-vaccine opinion clusters that causes disease outbreaks. The model provides a new way of modeling opinion dynamics and social influence by separating the cyber space and physical space. It identifies that the influence of anti-vaccine opinion leaders is two folded: (1) direct influence: this happens in the cyber space where the large amount of the followers receives information from opinion leaders and get influenced in certain degree; (2) indirect influence: in physical space, those who have been influenced by opinion leaders in cyber space carry such anti-vaccine sentiment and further have an impact in shaping opinions in their local communities. A disease transmission sub-model is applied after these two steps of extremism formation to test the degree of disease outbreaks cause by opinion clustering.