A Coupled Friedkin–Johnsen Model of Popularity Dynamics in Social Media

Popularity dynamics in social media depend on a complex interplay of social influence between users and popularity-based recommendations that are provided by the platforms. In this letter, we introduce a discrete-time dynamical system to model the evolution of popularity on social media. Our model generalizes the well-known Friedkin-Johnsen model to a set of influencers vying for popularity. We study the asymptotic behavior of this model and illustrate it with numerical examples. Our results highlight the interplay of social influence, past popularity, and content quality in determining the popularity of influencers.