Related papers: Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Reinforcement: …
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…
Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. It is therefore of prime importance for public health authorities to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a…
The influence of zealots on the noisy voter model is studied theoretically and numerically at the mean-field level. The noisy voter model is a modification of the voter model that includes a second mechanism for transitions between states:…
One of the fundamental structural properties of many networks is triangle closure. Whereas the influence of this transitivity on a variety of contagion dynamics has been previously explored, existing models of coevolving or adaptive network…
Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…
Belief perseverance is the widely documented tendency of holding to a belief, even in the presence of contradicting evidence. In online environments, this tendency leads to heated arguments with users ``blocking'' each other. Introducing…
Machine learning is used extensively in recommender systems deployed in products. The decisions made by these systems can influence user beliefs and preferences which in turn affect the feedback the learning system receives - thus creating…
We investigate the connection between Potts (Curie-Weiss) models and stochastic opinion models in the view of the Boltzmann distribution and stochastic Glauber dynamics. We particularly find that the q-voter model can be considered as a…
I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise endogenously.…
Priority users (e.g., verified profiles on Twitter) are social media users whose content is promoted by recommendation algorithms. However, the impact of this heterogeneous user influence on opinion dynamics, such as polarization phenomena,…
The noisy voter model is a stylised representation of opinion dynamics. Individuals copy opinions from other individuals, and are subject to spontaneous state changes. In the case of two opinion states this model is known to have a…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
The dynamics of opinion formation in a society is a complex phenomenon where many variables play an important role. Recently, the influence of algorithms to filter which content is fed to social networks users has come under scrutiny.…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
Influence among individuals is at the core of collective social phenomena such as the dissemination of ideas, beliefs or behaviors, social learning and the diffusion of innovations. Different mechanisms have been proposed to implement…