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The division of a social group into subgroups with opposing opinions, which we refer to as opinion disparity, is a prevalent phenomenon in society. This phenomenon has been modeled by including mechanisms such as opinion homophily, bounded…
The rising use of educational tools controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) has provoked a debate about their proficiency. While intrinsic proficiency, especially in tasks such as grading, has been measured and studied extensively,…
We present an extensive study of the joint effects of heterogeneous social agents and their heterogeneous social links in a bounded confidence opinion dynamics model. The full phase diagram of the model is explored for two different…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…
Digital communication has made the public discourse considerably more complex, and new actors and strategies have emerged as a result of this seismic shift. Aside from the often-studied interactions among individuals during opinion…
Consider public health officials aiming to spread awareness about a new vaccine in a community interconnected by a social network. How can they distribute information with minimal resources, so as to avoid polarization and ensure…
Aggregated data in real world recommender applications often feature fat-tailed distributions of the number of times individual items have been rated or favored. We propose a model to simulate such data. The model is mainly based on social…
The process of opinion formation through synthesis and contrast of different viewpoints has been the subject of many studies in economics and social sciences. Today, this process manifests itself also in online social networks and social…
Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…
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…
Affective polarization, the emotional divide characterized by in-group love (trust towards fellow partisans) and out-group hate (mistrust towards those with opposite political views), has become prevalent in the current society. Despite its…
Discussions of algorithmic bias tend to focus on examples where either the data or the people building the algorithms are biased. This gives the impression that clean data and good intentions could eliminate bias. The neutrality of the…
In this paper, we propose a Boltzmann-type kinetic description of opinion formation on social networks, which takes into account a general connectivity distribution of the individuals. We consider opinion exchange processes inspired by the…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…
Many people rely on online social networks as sources of news and information, and the spread of media content with ideologies across the political spectrum influences online discussions and impacts actions offline. To examine the impact of…
Social media platforms shape users' experiences through the algorithmic systems they deploy. In this study, we examine to what extent Twitter's content recommender, in conjunction with a user's social network, impacts the topic, political…
Network-based people recommendation algorithms are widely employed on the Web to suggest new connections in social media or professional platforms. While such recommendations bring people together, the feedback loop between the algorithms…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
People are often divided into conformists and contrarians, the former tending to align to the majority opinion in their neighborhood and the latter tending to disagree with that majority. In practice, however, the contrarian tendency is…