Related papers: Public discourse and social network echo chambers …
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new…
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…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
Rumors have ignited revolutions, undermined the trust in political parties, or threatened the stability of human societies. Such destructive potential has been significantly enhanced by the development of on-line social networks. Several…
Online social networks have become primary means of communication. As they often exhibit undesirable effects such as hostility, polarisation or echo chambers, it is crucial to develop analytical tools that help us better understand them. In…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is…
Recent years saw an increased interest in modeling and understanding the mechanisms of opinion and innovation spread through human networks. Using analysis of real-world social data, researchers are able to gain a better understanding of…
This study considers a simple variation of the voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two candidates or to remain neutral. People…
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…
Opinion polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in opinion dynamics. In contrast to the traditional consensus oriented group decision making (GDM) framework, this paper proposes a framework with the co-evolution of both opinions and…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
Search systems in online social media sites are frequently used to find information about ongoing events and people. For topics with multiple competing perspectives, such as political events or political candidates, bias in the top ranked…
Estimating the political leanings of social media users is a challenging and ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media consumption. We introduce Retweet-BERT, a simple and scalable model to estimate the political…
Many social media studies argue that social media creates echo chambers where some users only interact with peers of the same political orientation. However, recent studies suggest that a substantial amount of Cross-Partisan Interactions…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…