Original title: Digital Persuasion: Understanding the Impact of Online Influencers on Public Opinion
Omran Berjawi, Rida Khatoun, Giuseppe Fenza · September 2026
Online social networks shape public debates, but tracking how ideas spread is hard. Researchers studied this issue by building a framework based on the Friedkin-Johnsen model. This model assumes that every person has two opinions: an initial internal belief and the opinion they openly express. The team tested how the overall community opinion changes when they manipulated the starting opinions of influential users versus random users. They tested this method on real Twitter data from the U.S. presidential election. They found that users with the highest influencing scores significantly shifted the whole community opinion. Furthermore, this persuasion did not stop at direct followers. The impact of these online influencers reached past their immediate neighbors to their neighbors of neighbors.
Imagine a group of friends deciding where to eat. Each person has a private preference but often says something different to fit in. Now suppose one popular friend privately changes their favorite restaurant. That friend's expressed choice might shift, and then their close friends adjust, and even friends-of-friends start leaning that way. In this paper, the researchers model exactly this: each person has a private and a public opinion, and they show that changing the private opinion of a highly connected user can ripple through the network to affect people two steps away.
This matters because it shows that a single influential account can sway not just its own followers, but also the followers of those followers. That means campaigns, whether for elections or public health, need to account for ripple effects beyond direct audiences. It also raises concerns about how easily a small number of coordinated influencers can distort public opinion.
The abstract does not specify the size of the dataset or the number of influencers tested, so the scale of the effect is unclear. The framework is validated on a single dataset from the US presidential election, so results may not generalize to other contexts or platforms. The study simulates opinion manipulation rather than observing natural influence, so real-world dynamics might differ.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Digital Persuasion: Understanding the Impact of Online Influencers on Public Opinion — Omran Berjawi, Rida Khatoun, Giuseppe Fenza
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.