On the Fragility of Majority Illusions

Maaike Venema-Los; Zoé Christoff; Serte Donderwinkel; Davide Grossi

On the Fragility of Majority Illusions

Social and Information Networks 2026-07-24 v1

Authors: Maaike Venema-Los , Zoé Christoff , Serte Donderwinkel , Davide Grossi

Abstract

A majority illusion in a social network occurs when the majority of neighbors of an agent has a certain opinion while the majority of agents in the network has another opinion. We study the fragility of majority illusions, that is, whether illusions persist as a result of changes in the underlying network. We consider two settings. First, we study networks where agents have opinions that change over time and find that majority illusions disappear under majority updates. Second, we study sequences of large random graphs of which the size increases, and show that the likelihood of majority illusions goes to zero.

Keywords

majority illusion social networks opinion dynamics fragility random graphs majority update

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.22132,
  title  = {On the Fragility of Majority Illusions},
  author = {Maaike Venema-Los and Zoé Christoff and Serte Donderwinkel and Davide Grossi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.22132},
  year   = {2026}
}