Modeling Follow-Unfollow Mechanism in Social Networks with Evolutionary Game

Abstract

In online social networks (OSN), followers count is a sign of the social influence of an account. Some users expect to increase the followers count by following more accounts. However, in reality more followings do not generate more followers. In this paper, we propose a two player follow-unfollow game model and then introduce a factor for promoting cooperation. Based on the two player follow-unfollow game, we create an evolutionary follow-unfollow game with more players to simulate a miniature social network. We design an algorithm and conduct the simulation. From the simulation, we find that our algorithm for the evolutionary follow-unfollow game is able to converge and produce a stable network. Results obtained with different values of the cooperation promotion factor show that the promotion factor increases the total connections in the network especially through increasing the number of the follow follow connections.