Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens can be monitored during election times, given the accessibility of news related to the candidates and polls that precede the election's day. In this paper we present a novel two-dimensional data driven Mass Media model based on semantic analysis of newspapers and national election surveys, which we use to analyse how a single influence mechanism should behave in order to reproduce the behaviour of the voters. Using simple and feasible rules for dynamics, we were able to find a notable agreement between the model's predictions and the polls which help us to understand the underlying mechanisms of the interactions between reader and media.
Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach to influence estimation on social media networks and applies it to the real-world problem of characterizing active influence operations on Twitter during the 2017 French presidential elections. The new influence estimation approach attributes impact by accounting for narrative propagation over the network using a network causal inference framework applied to…
Pre-Construction of Opinion Dynamics Considering Structural Inequality: Interdisciplinary Analysis of Complex Social Stratification, Media Influence, and Functionalism
Using seasonal topics as the study subject, in this study, we focus on the timing gap between social media writing and online search behavior. To conduct our analysis, we used the mathematical model of search behavior, comprising the sociophysics approach. The seasonal topics selected were St.Valentine's Day, Halloween and New Year countdown. We also picked up the event like Christmas and Halloween. We analyzed the influence of blogs and Twitter on search behavior and found a deviation of interest in terms of timing. We also analyzed Japanese seasonal event of eating Eho-maki in February 3 and…
A key question of collective social behavior is related to the influence of Mass Media on public opinion. Different approaches have been developed to address quantitatively this issue, ranging from field experiments to mathematical models. In this work we propose a combination of tools involving natural language processing and time series analysis. We compare selected features of mass media news articles with measurable manifestation of public opinion. We apply our analysis to news articles belonging to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We compare variations in polls (as a proxy of public o…
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 positio…
Processes of individual attitude formation and their macroscopic consequences have become an intriguing research topic, and agent-based models of opinion formation have been proposed to understand this phenomenon. This study conducted an agent-based simulation and examined the role of mass media in a noisy opinion formation process, where opinion heterogeneity is preserved by a weak intensity of assimilation and errors accompanying opinion modifications. In a computational model, agents conformed to their neighbours' opinions in social networks. In addition, each agent tended to be influenced …
From graphons to real-world networks: kinetic opinion dynamics under selective media influence
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick（华威大学数学研究所）；Department of Mathematical Sciences “G. L. Lagrange”, Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学“G.L.拉格朗日”数学科学系）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Torino（意大利国家核物理研究所（INFN）都灵分部）
