A Logic for Knowledge Flow in Social Networks

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we develop a formal framework for analysing the flow of information and knowledge through social networks. Specifically, we propose a multi-agent epistemic logic in which we can represent and reason about communicative actions based on social networks and the resulting knowledge and ignorance of agents. We apply this logic to formally analyse the "Revolt or Stay-at-home" problem known from the literature, where social networks play an important role in agents' knowledge acquisition and decision-making. We evaluate our work by proving some mathematical properties of our new logic, including the fact that it generalises the existing Logic of Public Announcement.

Dynamic Epistemic Logics of Diffusion and Prediction in Social Networks

“…After recalling standard threshold models in Section 2.1, a dynamic logic for modeling threshold influence within social networks is introduced in Section 2.3. While conceptually in line with [10,11,24,28,32,35,39] in using logic to model social influence effects within network structures, our new framework distinguishes itself by avoiding the use of static modalities or hybrid logic tools. In this sense, the logical setting we introduce is "minimal": propositional logic is used to specify both the network structure and the agents behavior, and a single dynamic modality is used to represent the threshold-limited influence.…”

“…Socalled threshold models, having gained early, wide-spread attention through [18,33,34], are used precisely to represent the dynamics of diffusion under threshold-limited influence. This type of models has received a lot of attention in the recent literature [1,15,17,20,23,25,26,36], also within the logic community [8][9][10][11][12]24,28,29,32,35,39]. This paper has two goals.…”

Games of influence

“…Our work draws inspiration from psychological studies on group pressure, informal social communication and influence from majority groups to minorities (Asch, 1956;Festinger, 1950;Moscovici and Personnaz, 1980). Problems close to opinion diffusion are those of information cascades and knowledge diffusion, which have been given formal treatment in a logical setting (see, e.g., Ruan and Thielscher (2011); Baltag et al (2013)).…”

Formalising privacy policies in social networks

“…A private announcement is a disclosure of information between two agents, in which only the two involved agents are aware of the fact that the announcement occurred. In [31], DEL is used with the intended aim of studying by means of a formal technique the effect "Revolt or Stay-at-Home" in SNSs. This effect represents how the fact of knowing how many people (or agents) are going to revolt could influence our own decision of revolt or stay at home.…”