Opinion Optimization in Directed Social Networks

Abstract Shifting social opinions has far-reaching implications in various aspects, such as public health campaigns, product marketing, and political candidates. In this paper, we study a problem of opinion optimization based on the popular Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model for opinion dynamics in an unweighted directed social network with n nodes and m edges. In the FJ model, the internal opinion of every node lies in the closed interval [0, 1], with 0 and 1 being polar opposites of opinions about a certain issue. Concretely, we focus on the problem of selecting a small number of k<