What is it about?

Using a mathematical model, we consider whether it is possible to influence public opinion, for example to encourage support for a new vaccine, only by changing the social network on which people interact. We show that by affecting the strength of connections in the network, which could represent how much online content one person sees from another, it is often possible to guide public opinion towards some specific target. However, determining an effective and efficient way to do so proves to be a highly complex problem.

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Why is it important?

As we increasingly turn to social media for news and communication it is more important than ever to understand how the structure of our social networks could be manipulated, and what effect this might have on our opinions. This exploratory, theoretical work helps to develop some of the tools needed to address this problem.

Perspectives

In this paper, we had a first go at understanding the influence of manipulating a network on the evolution of opinion dynamics and how we can do it in such a way as to steer opinions in a certain direction. This is in contrast (and perhaps more realistic) than most existing work, which focuses on introducing controlled individuals (like a media outlet or social media bots) that try to influence opinions. While we are very far from a real world application of these ideas, it is exciting to see these methods evolving, and it gives us great insight on these problems.

Susana Gomes
University of Warwick

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This page is a summary of: Steering opinion dynamics through control of social networks, Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, July 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0211026.
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