Related papers: Harmonizing vs Polarizing Platform Influence Funct…

Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that…

This paper aims to provide a systemic analysis to social opinion dynamics subject to individual biases. As a generalization of the classical DeGroot social interactions, defined by linearly coupled dynamics of peer opinions that evolve over…

Public opinion is subject to peer interaction via social networks and external pressure from the media, advertising, and other actors. In this paper, we study the interaction between external and peer influence on the stochastic opinion…

The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…

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…

Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…

This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the interplay between decentralization -- a prevalent character of multi-agent systems -- and centralization, i.e., the task of imposing central control to meet system-level goals. In…

Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…

Understanding social polarization requires integrating insights from psychology, sociology, and complex systems science. Agent-based modeling provides a natural framework to combine perspectives from different fields and explore how…

We study the joint evolution of worldviews by proposing a model of opinion dynamics, which is inspired in notions from evolutionary ecology. Agents update their opinion on a specific issue based on their propensity to change -- asserted by…

Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…

Social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter play a key role in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information about climate change. This study analyses the topology of interactions in Twitter and their relation to cross-platform…

We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…

The dissemination of information and the development of public opinion are essential elements of most social media platforms and are often described as distinct, man-made occurrences. However, what is often disregarded is the…

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,…

Currently used models of opinion formation use random initial conditions. In reality, most people in a social network, except for a small fraction of the population, are initially either unaware of, or indifferent to, the disputed issue. To…

Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…

Nowadays, social media is the ground for political debate and exchange of opinions. There is a significant amount of research that suggests that social media are highly polarized. A phenomenon that is commonly observed is the echo chamber…

The impact of social media on critical issues such as echo chambers needs to be addressed, as these phenomena can have disruptive consequences for our society. Traditional research often oversimplifies emotional tendencies and opinion…

We propose the multidimensional social compass model, based on two competing key ingredients: DeGroot learning, driven by the social influence exerted across multiple topics, and the preference of individuals to maintain their initial…