Are Humans Like Ants? -- Analyzing Collective Opinion Formation in Online Discussions

Web 2.0 platforms give people more power over the way they share information and exchange opinions. The increase in social interactivity leads to the emerging of self-organized communities where members form their opinions via social swarming. This paper introduces a new approach which enables predicting and explaining the process of collective opinion formation by social swarming. A computational model for simulating collective opinion formation is derived from the ant colony meta-heuristic and applied to an exemplary online community where the members´ opinions are identified via text mining. For validation purposes, this approach is compared to three other approaches.