Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Poster

SOE 7.26: Poster

Monday, March 12, 2018, 17:00–20:00, Poster E

Studying the Impact of the Filter Bubble effect on Opinion Formations — •Martin Gestefeld and Stefan Bornholdt — Institut for Theoretical Physics, University of Bremen, Germany

In recent years, opinion formation in society appears to be more polarized than in the years before. One hypothesis is that this might be a consequence of online social media and, in particular, the so-called filter bubble effect. The term filter bubble [1] was introduced by Eli Pariser in 2010 and denotes the effect that online social networks and news portals display personalized content via filter algorithms. Therefore it is more likely that a user is confronted with the own opinion resulting in an effective isolation from opposing viewpoints. Here we use the sociophysics model of Deffuant et al.[2] to study this behaviour. Traditionally this continuous model is used to investigate the mixing of beliefs. In order to investigate a filter bubble effect, we modify the Deffuant model by adding a preferential pairing to more similar neighbours. We then study the modified model’s dynamics and if this additional dynamics leads to opinion polarization.

[1] Pariser, Eli. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK, 2011.

[2] Deffuant, Guillaume, et al.: Mixing beliefs among interacting agents, Advances in Complex Systems 3.01n04 (2000): 87-98.