The Truth About Silence In Social Networks?

The Spiral of Silence theory has been questioned by scholars both at home and abroad since it was put forward by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1974,and has become one of the most controversial theories in communication science.In recent years,with the rapid development of the Internet,its anonymity has brought about “decentralisation”and “depersonalisation”,which leads to an increase in the willingness of netizens to express their personal opinions,and even the emergence of the “anti-spiral of silence”.However,there are still some studies showing that the spiral of silence still occurs on social media.Therefore,in an anonymous network environment,does the silent "crowd" still appear? What are the factors behind the silence of netizens?Based on the above background,this paper introduces a research method named Agent-based model in the field of computer science to simulate the phenomenon of the“spiral of silence”.By simplifying the behavioral features of the complex real society into the “agencies” as well as their interactive rules in a simulated environment,this thesis raises the following research questions: 1)What is the impact of the personal opinion expression threshold in social networks on individual opinion expression attitudes and opinion factions? 2)How do opinion leaders influence individual opinion expression attitudes and opinion factions in social networks? 3)How does the opinion climate of the mainstream media affect the attitudes of individual opinions and opinion factions held by them? 4)Does the size of the population in social networks impact their attitudes towards individual opinions and opinion factions?This thesis utilizes Net Logo software to complete the simulation,where the "turtles" in the software represent the three major variables of netizens,hardcore and opinion leaders,and “patches” stand for mainstream media.By setting the variables like “opinion”,“opinion faction” and interaction rules for each agent,the model simulates the influence of their opinions in the social environment to see if they will express their opinions publicly.For instance,if the number of an agent's neighbors who share his or her opinion exceeds his or her own opinion expression threshold,this agent is required to express his or her opinion in public according to the rules.The result after 100 iterations of the model shows that the simulated environment does not produce the “spiral of silence” as expected.The expression threshold is significantly positively correlated with the number of people in the environment who remain silent and significantly negatively correlated with the number of people who express their opinions publicly;the number of opinion leaders is significantly negatively correlated with the number of people who remain silent and significantly positively correlated with the number of people who express their opinions publicly.But it could not be found that the opinion climate of the mainstream media has a significant correlation with the total size of the population in community as well as the number of silent or active ones.In addition,no significant correlations were found between the four variables of opinion expression threshold,opinion leaders,the opinion climate of the mainstream media and total community size and opinion faction,but it could be observed that when there is an “anti-silencing phenomenon” in the simulated environment,there is only one opinion faction remaining in the environment which shows the trend towards “all speak but with the oligarchy tendency of public opinion”phenomena.