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Online social networks provide users with unprecedented opportunities to engage with diverse opinions. At the same time, they enable confirmation bias on large scales by empowering individuals to self-select narratives they want to be…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
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…
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…
Understanding political polarization on social platforms is important as public opinions may become increasingly extreme when they are circulated in homogeneous communities, thus potentially causing damage in the real world. Automatically…
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,…
Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…
We study concentration inequalities in gossip opinion dynamics over random graphs. In the model, a network is generated from a random graph model with independent edges, and agents interact pairwise randomly over the network. During the…
Research across different disciplines has documented the expanding polarization in social media. However, much of it focused on the US political system or its culturally controversial topics. In this work, we explore polarization on Twitter…
The phenomenon of opinion disagreement has been empirically observed and reported in the literature, which is affected by various factors, such as the structure of social networks. An important discovery in network science is that most…
This work extends a model of simulating influence in a network of stochastic edge dynamics to account for polarization. The model built upon is termed Dynamic Communicators and seeks to understand the process which produces low volume, high…
Recent research in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown success in learning social behavior and cooperation. Social dilemmas between agents in mixed-sum settings have been studied extensively, but there is little research…
With the rapid growth of online social media, people become increasingly overwhelmed by the volume and the content of the information present in the environment. The threshold model is currently one of the most common methods to capture the…
In an online social network, link recommendations are a way for users to discover relevant links to people they may know, thereby potentially increasing their engagement on the platform. However, the addition of links to a social network…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
The complexity of human behaviour can lead to very unpredictable patterns in social activity and structure. Here we demonstrate the instability of a community network controlled by majority ruling, where an element adopts the most popular…
Motivated by empirical research on bias and opinion formation, we formulate a multidimensional nonlinear opinion-dynamical model where agents have individual biases, which are fixed, as well as opinions, which evolve. The dimensions…
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…
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…
We propose a model of binary opinion in which the opinion of the individuals change according to the state of their neighbouring domains. If the neighbouring domains have opposite opinions, then the opinion of the domain with the larger…