Related papers: Echo chamber formation sharpened by priority users

Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…

Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…

Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play…

Considerable efforts are currently underway to mitigate the negative impacts of echo chambers, such as increased susceptibility to fake news and resistance towards accepting scientific evidence. Prior research has presented the development…

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.…

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.…

Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been…

Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…

The boom of online social media and microblogging platforms has rapidly alter the way we consume news and exchange opinions. Even though considerable efforts try to recommend various contents to users, loss of information diversity and the…

The overwhelming amount and rate of information update in online social media is making it increasingly difficult for users to allocate their attention to their topics of interest, thus there is a strong need for prioritizing news feeds.…

We consider the problem of optimizing the placement of stubborn agents in a social network in order to maximally influence the population. We assume the network contains stubborn users whose opinions do not change, and non-stubborn users…

Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…

Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…

Starting from a symmetrical multiple choice individual I build a sociophysics model of decision making. Reducing the choices to two and interactions to pairs recover the Ising model from physics at zero temperature. The associated…

As the last few years have seen an increase in online hostility and polarization both, we need to move beyond the fack-checking reflex or the praise for better moderation on social networking sites (SNS) and investigate their impact on…

Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…

We explore a method to influence or even control the diversity of opinions within a polarised social group. We leverage the voter model in which users hold binary opinions and repeatedly update their beliefs based on others they connect…

Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies. Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote opinion…