An information diffusion model based on retweeting mechanism for online social media

To characterize information propagation on online microblogs, we propose a diffusion model (SCIR) which contains four possible states: Susceptible, contacted, infected and refractory. Agents that read the information but have not decided to spread it, stay in the contacted state. They may become infected or refractory, and both the infected and refractory state are stable. Results show during the evolution process, more contacted agents appear in scale-free networks than in regular lattices. The degree based density of infected agents increases with the degree monotonously, but larger average network degree doesn't always mean less relaxation time. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.