Contrarian effects in opinion dynamics

• This paper talks about contrarian opinions in a multi-opinion scenario by considering the relationship
between network topology and opinion dynamics.
• They use two measurements to explain this relationship
• Opinion diversity
• Network modularity
• The specific new situation being considered is the fact that “agents” in a network can essentially rewire
their connections based on opinion modifications.
• A modified version of Sznajd model of opinion dynamics was used.
• Moreover, when changing one’s opinion, agents tend to choose the less prevailing one (underdog
effect), also known as the contrarian opinion.
• The reconnection is modelled based on the network properties and the transitivity in friendship
dynamics.
Engagement dynamics across topics on Facebook
• Studies observed how “vitality” of a post increases the likelihood of inducing polarisation, hate speech or
toxic behaviours rather than features like quality or topic.
• They observe that “interest” is a cumulative process and it takes time.
• Topics with sudden virality tend to occur with more controversial topics
• Steady evolution exhibit more positive and homogenous reaction types
• They use a GDELT news dataset in order to isolate the list of topics. The isolation is achieved by applying
Louvain’s algorithm onto the dataset.
• They use sentiment scores to assess controversy.
• They use non-linear least squares regression onto the dataset in order to provide a quantitative assessment
• Findings conclude that, on average, users’ interest in topics does not increase exponentially after their
appearance but, instead, grows steadily until it reaches a saturation point.
Engagement dynamics across topics on Facebook
• Talks about using RNNs to detect political ideology based on text. Claims to be an
alternative to generic NLP techniques.
• Manual verification is not practical and moreover, the bias is mostly localised to a
small part of the document undetectable by coarse-grained methods.
• This RNN model clearly outperforms models like bag-of-words.
• But this paper was written in a political ideology context (conservatives vs liberals).
Formation of continuous opinion dynamics based on a gambling
mechanism and its sensitivity analysis
• This paper explores a mathematical model of how opinions form and change in a society,
particularly when it comes to issues like public opinions or political views. They use a metaphor of
a gambling game where people bet on different opinions, and the amount they bet depends on their
confidence in that opinion.
• They're interested in how factors like people's confidence in their opinions, the resources they have,
and whether they're following others or thinking independently affect the formation of opinions.
• They distinguish between two types of people: mindless agents who don't think critically and
economic agents who make informed decisions. This differentiation helps understand how different
types of individuals impact opinion formation.
• They conduct a sensitivity analysis to see which factors have the most significant impact on opinion
dynamics. This helps identify which factors are crucial in shaping public opinions.
Argumentation Reasoning with Graph Neural Networks
• The paper presents a novel approach that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with
argumentation frameworks to compute polarization bias levels in Reddit debates.
• They represent Reddit debates using a Pruned Debate Tree (PDebT), a type of
argumentation framework. They construct this tree based on comments and their
relationships, creating a bipartite graph representing agreement and disagreement.
• The paper incorporates GIN (Graph Isomorphism Networks) into their model to
approximate the polarization degree. The GNN takes the PDebT as input and outputs a
bias-level measurement.
• The results show that the GNN model effectively approximates the polarization degree, and
different GIN layer configurations have little impact.