A Social Network Structure Analysis of Former Smokers in Emerging Markets Using China’s Twitter

Abstract

Social networks are widely used for proping the process of tobacco control in emerging markets, but their formation and effects are not well understood. Using the microblogging platform Sina (Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter) as an example, this article conducts a multi-agent simulation analysis of the Netlogo platform to analyze the micro-level behavioral characteristics of former smokers and macro-evolutionary law in the formation of social networks in emerging markets. The results show that the tobacco control in use of social networks have two characteristics: limitations on the size of the network and the in-degree and out-degree of its nodes as well as heterogeneous attributes of the nodes. This kind of network is better at simulating a real social network than small-world and scale-free networks.