Behavior modeling of internet water army in online forums

Abstract

The behavior patterns and strategies of Internet Water Army in online forums are investigated in this paper. Internet Water Army focuses on the controlling and steering of cyber collective opinions, and adjusts their behavior according to two principles: to avoid being exposed and to increase the ability to exert influence. To study how the ability of Internet Water Army to exert influence, we construct a multi-agent system with coevolution of topics and cyber collective behaviors and design the behavior patterns and strategies of Internet Water Army. Based on synthetic data and real data, we find that Internet Water Army dynamically adjusts their behavior strategy to maximize their influence and the effectiveness of strategy of Internet Water Army is closely related to the features of the users. Our work sheds insight on the design of viral marketing mechanism in e-commerce systems as well as on guiding collective behaviors in social media.