Related papers: Do zealots increase or decrease the polarization i…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
The effects of social media on critical issues, such as polarization and misinformation, are under scrutiny due to the disruptive consequences that these phenomena can have on our societies. Among the algorithms routinely used by social…
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose…
We generalize Condorcet's jury theorem (CJT) to socially connected populations in which agents revise discrete choices on a network in the presence of zealots. Free agents receive privately informative signals about the correct alternative…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Polarization and echo chambers are often studied in the context of explicitly political events such as elections, and little scholarship has examined the mixing of political groups in non-political contexts. A major obstacle to studying…
Understanding the emergence of extreme opinions and in what kind of environment they might become less extreme is a central theme in our modern globalized society. A model combining continuous opinions and observed discrete actions (CODA)…
Echo chamber effects in social networks are generally attributed to the prevalence of interactions among like-minded peers. However, recent evidence has emphasized the role of hostile interactions between opposite-minded groups. We…
In (Deffuant et al., 2002), we proposed a simple model of opinion dynamics, which we used to simulate the influence of extremists in a population. Simulations were run without any specific interaction structure and varying the simulation…
Polarization between groups is a major topic of contemporary societal debate as well as of research into intergroup relations. Formal modelers of opinion dynamics try to explain how intergroup polarization can arise from simple first…
Following recent policy changes by X (Twitter) and other social media platforms, user interaction data has become increasingly difficult to access. These restrictions are impeding robust research pertaining to social and political phenomena…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
Networks, representing attitudinal survey data, expose the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine…
In this paper, we study a model of opinion dynamics in a social network in the presence increasing interpersonal influence, i.e., increasing peer pressure. Each agent in the social network has a distinct social stress function given by a…
Timeline algorithms are key parts of online social networks, but during recent years they have been blamed for increasing polarization and disagreement in our society. Opinion-dynamics models have been used to study a variety of phenomena…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
AI-based social media platforms has already transformed the nature of economic and social interaction. AI enables the massive scale and highly personalized nature of online information sharing that we now take for granted. Extensive…
In the process of enacting or introducing a new policy, policymakers frequently consider the population's responses. These considerations are critical for effective governance. There are numerous methods to gauge the ground sentiment from a…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…