Related papers: Segregation Before Polarization: How Recommendatio…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019…
Individuals increasingly rely on social networking platforms to form opinions. However, these platforms typically aim to maximize engagement, which may not align with social good. In this paper, we introduce an opinion dynamics model where…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
Personalized content on social platforms can exacerbate negative phenomena such as polarization, partly due to the feedback interactions between recommendations and the users. In this paper, we present a control-theoretic recommender system…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
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…
Global social and ecological challenges represent collective action problems requiring rapid and sufficient cooperation with pro-mitigation norms. Sociopolitical polarization hinders such cooperation. Prior agent-based models showed…
This study investigates echo chambers in social networks through an analysis of Twitter news accounts. Utilizing bias labels from the AllSides website, we construct a dataset representing six dimensions of news bias. Through manual…
Structural balance theory has been developed in sociology and psychology to explain how interacting agents, e.g., countries, political parties, opinionated individuals, with mixed trust and mistrust relationships evolve into polarized…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
This paper studies controlling segregation in social networks via exogenous incentives. We construct an edge formation game on a directed graph. A user (node) chooses the probability with which it forms an inter- or intra- community edge…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
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…
With ever-increasing amounts of online information available, modeling and predicting individual preferences-for books or articles, for example-is becoming more and more important. Good predictions enable us to improve advice to users, and…
Social media platforms are online fora where users engage in discussions, share content, and build connections. This review explores the dynamics of social interactions, user-generated contents, and biases within the context of social media…
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…
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…