Related papers: Public and private beliefs under disinformation in…
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…
An abundance of literature has shown that the injection of noise into complex socio-economic systems can improve their resilience. This study aims to understand whether the same applies in the context of information diffusion in social…
As the consequences of opinion polarization effect our everyday life in more and more aspect, the understanding of its origins and driving forces becomes increasingly important. Here we develop an agent-based network model with realistic…
Understanding the spread of false or dangerous beliefs through a population has never seemed so urgent. Network science researchers have often taken a page from epidemiologists, and modeled the spread of false beliefs as similar to how a…
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a "dissenting" opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people,…
A common assumption in the social learning literature is that agents exchange information in an unselfish manner. In this work, we consider the scenario where a subset of agents aims at driving the network beliefs to the wrong hypothesis.…
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
We study an endogenous opinion (or, belief) dynamics model where we endogenize the social network that models the link (`trust') weights between agents. Our network adjustment mechanism is simple: an agent increases her weight for another…
Unlike many complex networks studied in the literature, social networks rarely exhibit unanimous behavior, or consensus. This requires a development of mathematical models that are sufficiently simple to be examined and capture, at the same…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
There are numerous examples of societies with extremely stable mix of contrasting opinions. We argue that this stability is a result of an interplay between society network topology adjustment and opinion changing processes. To support this…
We examine how misinformation spreads in social networks composed of individuals with long-term offline relationships. Especially, we focus on why misinformation persists and diffuses despite being recognized by most as false. In our…
A common assumption in the social learning literature is that agents exchange information in an unselfish manner. In this work, we consider the scenario where a subset of agents aims at deceiving the network, meaning they aim at driving the…
This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
With the advent of online networks, societies are substantially more connected with individual members able to easily modify and maintain their own social links. Here, we show that active network maintenance exposes agents to confirmation…
Despite the increasing diffusion of the Internet technology, TV remains the principal medium of communication. People's perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and opinions about matter of facts get (in)formed through the information reported on by…
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…
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,…
Social media has emerged as a significant source of information for people. As agents interact with each other through social media platforms, they create numerous complex social networks. Within these networks, information spread among…