Graphic Model of The Target Audience of Psychological Influence in Social Networks

In today’s armed conflicts, such as the conflict in eastern Ukraine, subdivisions of the psychological operations of special operations forces use social Internet services for psychological impact on the target audience. The fuzzy concept of ‘target audience’ requires development of a scientifically sound approach to its formal description. One of the important stages of psychological operations is the study of the target audience. In this paper, formalization is reduced to the construction of a graph model of the target audience. Its feature is that it takes into account the characteristics inherent in the actors of social Internet services, in particular social networks. The developed graph model allows to take into account the structure of the target audience and to define separate structural elements. Features of construction of graph model of target audience using the method of Social networks analysis are considered. The connections underlying the graph model in accordance with the Social networks analysis are substantiated. The stages of constructing a graph model are described and the algorithm for constructing a target audience in the social networks is presented. The adequacy of the developed model is proved by a model example.