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The advent of social media platforms has revolutionized information consumption patterns, with individuals frequently engaging in these platforms for social interactions. This trend has fostered an environment where people gravitate towards…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
Among different aspects of social networks, dynamics have been proposed to simulate how opinions can be transmitted. In this study, we propose a model that simulates the communication in an online social network, in which the posts are…
We study a family of opinion formation models in one dimension where the propensity for a voter to align with its local environment depends non-linearly on the fraction of disagreeing neighbors. Depending on this non-linearity in the voting…
Consensus protocols play an important role in the study of distributed algorithms. In this paper, we study the effect of bias on two popular consensus protocols, namely, the {\em voter rule} and the {\em 2-choices rule} with binary…
Understanding the emergence of strong controversial issues in modern societies is a key issue in opinion studies. A commonly diffused idea is the fact that the increasing of homophily in social networks, due to the modern ICT, can be a…
Non-linear voter models assume that the opinion of an agent depends on the opinions of its neighbors in a non-linear manner. This allows for voting rules different from majority voting. While the linear voter model is known to reach…
We study a graph-based generalization of the Galam opinion formation model. Consider a simple connected graph which represents a social network. Each node in the graph is colored either blue or white, which indicates a positive or negative…
In opinion dynamics, as in general usage, polarisation is subjective. To understand polarisation, we need to develop more precise methods to measure the agreement in society. This paper presents four mathematical measures of polarisation…
We propose the multidimensional social compass model, based on two competing key ingredients: DeGroot learning, driven by the social influence exerted across multiple topics, and the preference of individuals to maintain their initial…
Are we as a society getting more polarized, and if so, why? We try to answer this question through a model of opinion formation. Empirical studies have shown that homophily results in polarization. However, we show that DeGroot's well-known…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
One form of long-term behavior revealed by opinion dynamics simulations is intermittency, where an individual cycles between eras of stable, constant beliefs and turbulent, fluctuating beliefs, for example when inferring the political bias…
Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…
We explore the networks that yield the largest mean consensus time of voter models under different update rules. By analytical and numerical means, we show that the so-called lollipop graph, barbell graph, and double star graph maximise the…
Nowadays, social media is the ground for political debate and exchange of opinions. There is a significant amount of research that suggests that social media are highly polarized. A phenomenon that is commonly observed is the echo chamber…