Regensburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 2: Computational Social Science and Data Science I
SOE 2.3: Vortrag
Montag, 1. April 2019, 10:15–10:30, H17
Activity-driven radicalization phenomena in public discussions — •Fabian Baumann1, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen2, Philipp Hövel2, and Igor M. Sokolov1 — 1Institut für Physik - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — 2Institut für Theoretische Physik - TU Berlin
We aim for a novel model for the description of the adoption of extreme opinions in a population of socially interacting agents, which we term radicalization. Inspired by multiple reports of strong opinion polarization, measurable from social media data and our own empirical insights into pre-election debates on Twitter, we investigate on the possible mechanisms of opinion reinforcement by peers. In a minimal scenario of binary opinion formation within a population, we introduce a simple mechanism of increasing conviction upon contacts to like-minded peers.
Combined with established concepts from constructive opinion dynamics models, this leads to two qualitatively different outcomes: (1) a global consensus and (2) a separation into two polarized (political) camps. On modern communication platforms, like Twitter, spreading information among a large number of peers became possible at low cost. Furthermore it is now, on a large-scale, possible to measure the occurring interactions. Extending our model by a simple mechanism for the activation of agents we aim for an explanatory link between the observed political opinion landscape and the (heterogeneously distributed) activities of social media users.