A Noise Based Medical Elites Silence Model and Public Health Opinion Distortion in Social Networks

Abstract

Under the impact of internet populism, internet violence, and other noises on the internet, medical elites, who have a professional background, did not intend to share their opinions on the internet. Thus, misinformation about health is increasingly prevalent. We roughly divided the users in social networks into ordinary users, medical elites, and super-influencers. In this paper, we propose a communication model of health information based on the improved Hegselmann-Krause (H-K) model. By conducting MATLAB-based simulation, the experimental results showed that network noise was an important factor that interfered with opinion propagation regarding health. The louder the noise is, the harder it is for health opinions within a group to reach a consensus. But even in a noisy environment, super-influencers could influence the overall cognition on public health in the social network fundamentally. When the super-influencers held positive opinions in public health, the medical elite keeping silent had a noise-tolerant effect on opinion communication in public health, and vice versa. Thus, three factors concerning noise control, the free information release of medical elites, and the positive position of super-influence are very important to form a virtuous information environment for public health.