Related papers: Competing Activists--Political Polarization
Understanding and quantifying polarization in social systems is important because of many reasons. It could for instance help to avoid segregation and conflicts in the society or to control polarized debates and predict their outcomes. In…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the…
We introduce a general contagion-like model for competing opinions that includes dynamic resistance to alternative opinions. We show that this model can describe candidate vote distributions, spatial vote correlations, and a slow approach…
The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
The formation of collective opinion is a complex phenomenon that results from the combined effects of mass media exposure and social influence between individuals. The present work introduces a model of opinion formation specifically…
News sharing on social networks reveals how information disseminates among users. This process, constrained by user preferences and social ties, plays a key role in the formation of public opinion. In this work we study news sharing of main…
The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of external…
Political campaigns involve, in the simplest case, two competing campaign groups which try to obtain a majority of votes. We propose a novel mathematical framework to study political campaign dynamics on social networks whose constituents…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
We study an opinion dynamics model that explores the competition between persuasion and compromise in a population of agents with nearest-neighbor interactions on a two-dimensional square lattice. Each agent can hold either a positive or a…
We present a many-body theory that explains and reproduces recent observations of population polarization dynamics, is supported by controlled human experiments, and addresses the controversy surrounding the Internet's impact. It predicts…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders in a world that is becoming more and more globalised. This news and opinion is often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily such as political…
In this age of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion polarization, the spread of propaganda and…
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…