Social influence is largely recognized as a key factor in opinion formation processes. Recently, the role of external forces in inducing opinion displacement and polarization in social networks has attracted significant attention. This is in particular motivated by the necessity to understand and possibly prevent interference phenomena during political campaigns and elections. In this paper, we formulate and solve a targeted intervention problem for opinion displacement minimization on a social network. Specifically, we consider a min-max problem whereby a social planner (the defender) aims at selecting the optimal network intervention within her given budget constraint in order to minimize the opinion displacement in the system that an adversary (the attacker) is instead trying to maximize. Our results show that the optimal intervention of the defender has two regimes. For large enough budget, the optimal intervention of the social planner acts on all nodes proportionally to a new notion of network centrality. For lower budget values, such optimal intervention has a more delicate structure and is rather concentrated on a few target individuals.

Targeting interventions for displacement minimization in opinion dynamics / Damonte, Luca; Como, G.; Fagnani, F.. - DECISION AND CONTROL. IEEE CONFERENCE. 61ST 2022. (CDC 2022), (2022), pp. 7023-7028. (2022 IEEE 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Cancun, Mexico, 6-9 December 2022). [10.1109/CDC51059.2022.9992358].

Targeting interventions for displacement minimization in opinion dynamics

Damonte L.;
2022

Abstract

Social influence is largely recognized as a key factor in opinion formation processes. Recently, the role of external forces in inducing opinion displacement and polarization in social networks has attracted significant attention. This is in particular motivated by the necessity to understand and possibly prevent interference phenomena during political campaigns and elections. In this paper, we formulate and solve a targeted intervention problem for opinion displacement minimization on a social network. Specifically, we consider a min-max problem whereby a social planner (the defender) aims at selecting the optimal network intervention within her given budget constraint in order to minimize the opinion displacement in the system that an adversary (the attacker) is instead trying to maximize. Our results show that the optimal intervention of the defender has two regimes. For large enough budget, the optimal intervention of the social planner acts on all nodes proportionally to a new notion of network centrality. For lower budget values, such optimal intervention has a more delicate structure and is rather concentrated on a few target individuals.
2022
Opinion dynamics, Target interventions, Network systems, Disagreement, Polarization
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
2209.06481v1.pdf

Solo gestori archivio

Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Licenza: Tutti i diritti riservati
Dimensione 386.74 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
386.74 kB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri
Pubblicazioni consigliate

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11385/242099
Citazioni
  • Scopus 0
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 0
  • OpenAlex ND
social impact