Opinion control in complex networks

In many political elections, the electorate appears to be a composite of partisan and independent voters. Given that partisans are not likely to convert to a different party, an important goal for a political party could be to mobilize independent voters toward the party with the help of strong leadership, mass media, partisans, and the effects of peer-to-peer influence. Based on the exact solution of classical voter model dynamics in the presence of perfectly partisan voters (i.e., zealots), we propose a computational method that uses pinning control strategy to maximize the share of a party in a social network of independent voters. The party, corresponding to the controller or zealots, optimizes the nodes to be controlled given the information about the connectivity of independent voters and the set of nodes that the opposing party controls. We show that controlling hubs is generally a good strategy, but the optimized strategy is even better. The superiority of the optimized strategy is particularly eminent when the independent voters are connected as directed (rather than undirected) networks.