  Designing feasible control strategies for opinion dynamics in complex social
systems has never been an easy task. It requires a control protocol which 1) is
not enforced on all individuals in the society, and 2) does not exclusively
rely on specific opinion values shared by the social system. Thanks to the
recent studies on noise-induced consensus in opinion dynamics, the noise-based
intervention strategy has emerged as the only one meeting both of the above
requirements, yet its underlying general theory is still lacking. In this
paper, we perform rigorous theoretical analysis and simulations of a
noise-based control strategy for opinion formation in which only a fraction of
individuals is affected by randomly generated noise. We found that irrespective
of the number of noise-driven individuals, including the case of only one
single noise-affected individual, the system can attain a quasi-consensus in
finite time, and the critical noise strength can be obtained. Our results
highlight the efficiency of noise-driven mechanisms for the control of complex
social dynamics.
