A Model for the Influence of Media on the Ideology of Content in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Many people rely on online social networks as sources of news and information, and the spread of media content with ideologies across the political spectrum influences online discussions and impacts actions offline. To examine the impact of media in online social networks, we generalize bounded-confidence models of opinion dynamics by incorporating media accounts as influencers in a network. We quantify partisanship of content with a continuous parameter on an interval, and we formulate higher-dimensional generalizations to incorporate content quality and increasingly nuanced political positions. We simulate our model with one and two ideological dimensions, and we use the results of our simulations to quantify the "entrainment" of content from non-media accounts to the ideologies of media accounts in a network. We maximize media impact in a social network by tuning the number of media accounts that promote the content and the number of followers of the accounts. Using numerical computations, we find that the entrainment of the ideology of content spread by non-media accounts to media ideology depends on a network's structural features, including its size, the mean number of followers of its nodes, and the receptiveness of its nodes to different opinions. We then introduce content quality --- a key novel contribution of our work --- into our model. We incorporate multiple media sources with ideological biases and quality-level estimates that we draw from real media sources and demonstrate that our model can produce distinct communities ("echo chambers") that are polarized in both ideology and quality. Our model provides a step toward understanding content quality and ideology in spreading dynamics, with ramifications for how to mitigate the spread of undesired content and promote the spread of desired content.

References in corpus (16)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Multilayer Networks
• Temporal Networks
• The Rise of Social Bots
• Social Structure of Facebook Networks
• Biased Assimilation, Homophily and the Dynamics of Polarization
• Modeling echo chambers and polarization dynamics in social networks
• Opinion fluctuations and disagreement in social networks
• On the Role of Zealotry in the Voter Model
• A network analysis of committees in the United States House of Representatives
• Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks
• Mobility and Social Network Effects on Extremist Opinions
• Opinion formation and distribution in a bounded confidence model on various networks
• Spreading of Memes on Multiplex Networks
• Opinion Formation under Antagonistic Influences
• Polarization and Consensus by Opposing External Sources

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Recent advances in opinion propagation dynamics: A 2020 Survey
• Local Edge Dynamics and Opinion Polarization
• Opinion disparity in hypergraphs with community structure
• Opinion dynamics on tie-decay networks
• Discerning media bias within a network of political allies and opponents: the idealized example of a biased coin
• Catalyzing collaborations: Prescribed interactions at conferences determine team formation
• Vacillating about media bias: changing one's mind intermittently within a network of political allies and opponents
• Relative opinion similarity leads to the emergence of large clusters in opinion formation models
• The dual problems of coordination and anti-coordination on random bipartite graphs
• Interplay between exogenous triggers and endogenous behavioral changes in contagion processes on social networks