Influences of Fanatics and Chatters on Information Diffusion on the Internet

Models that provide insight into how various behaviors of online discussants may influence information diffusion on the Internet are of great current interest. In this paper, we propose an agent based model to mimic the diffusion of online topic discussion, and study effects of different online discussants, i.e. fanatics and chatters, on the diffusion process. Simulation results show that degree distributions of fanatics and chatters play an important role in the diffusion. Increase in the number of fanatics always results in a raise in diffusion scale, while increase in the number of chatters exerts different influences on the diffusion process.