1,720,969 research outputs found
Opinion Dynamic Modeling of News Perception
No full textDuring the last decade, the advent of the Web and online social networks rapidly changed the way we were used to search, gather and discuss information of any kind. These tools have given everyone the chance to become a news medium. While promoting more democratic access to information, direct and unfiltered communication channels may increase our chances to confront malicious/misleading behavior. Fake news diffusion represents one of the most pressing issues of our online society. In recent years, fake news has been analyzed from several perspectives; among such vast literature, an important theme is the analysis of fake news’ perception. In this work, moving from such observation, I propose a family of opinion dynamics models to understand the role of specific social factors on the acceptance/rejection of news contents. In particular, I model and discuss the effect that stubborn agents, different levels of trust among individuals, open-mindedness, attraction/repulsion phenomena, and similarity between agents have on the population dynamics of news perception. To discuss the peculiarities of the proposed models, I tested them on two synthetic network topologies thus underlying when/how they affect the stable states reached by the performed simulations
Community-Aware Content Diffusion: Embeddednes and Permeability
No full textViruses, opinions, ideas are different contents sharing a common trait: they need carriers embedded into a social context to spread. Modeling and approximating diffusive phenomena have always played an essential role in a varied range of applications from outbreak prevention to the analysis of meme and fake news. Classical approaches to such a task assume diffusion processes unfolding in a mean-field context, every actor being able to interact with all its peers. However, during the last decade, such an assumption has been progressively superseded by the availability of data modeling the real social network of individuals, thus producing a more reliable proxy for social interactions as spreading vehicles. In this work, following such a trend, we propose alternative ways of leveraging apriori knowledge on mesoscale network topology to design community-aware diffusion models with the aim of better approximate the spreading of content over complex and clustered social tissues
From Mean-Field to Complex Topologies: Network Effects on the Algorithmic Bias Model
No full textNowadays, we live in a society where people often form their opinion by accessing and discussing contents shared on social networking websites. While these platforms have fostered information access and diffusion, they represent optimal environments for the proliferation of polluted contents, which is argued to be one of the co-causes of polarization/radicalization. Moreover, recommendation algorithms - intended to enhance platform usage - are likely to augment such phenomena, generating the so called Algorithmic Bias. In this work, we study the impact that different network topologies have on the formation and evolution of opinion in the context of a recent opinion dynamic model which includes bounded confidence and algorithmic bias. Mean-field, scale-free and random topologies, as well as networks generated by the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi benchmark, are compared in terms of opinion fragmentation/polarization and time to convergence
NDlib: A Python Library to Model and Analyze Diffusion Processes over Complex Networks
No full textNowadays the analysis of dynamics of and on networks represents a hot topic in the Social Network Analysis playground. To support students, teachers, developers and researchers we introduced a novel framework, named NDlib, an environment designed to describe diffusion simulations. NDlib is designed to be a multi-level ecosystem that can be fruitfully used by different user segments. Upon NDlib, we designed a simulation server that allows remote execution of experiments as well as an online visualization tool that abstracts its programmatic interface and makes available the simulation platform to non-technicians
Opinion Dynamic Modeling of Fake News Perception
No full textFake news diffusion represents one of the most pressing issues of our online society. In recent years, fake news has been analyzed from several points of view, primarily to improve our ability to separate them from the legit ones as well as identify their sources. Among such vast literature, a rarely discussed theme is likely to play uttermost importance in our understanding of such a controversial phenomenon: the analysis of fake news’ perception. In this work, we approach such a problem by proposing a family of opinion dynamic models tailored to study how specific social interaction patterns concur to the acceptance, or refusal, of fake news by a population of interacting individuals. To discuss the peculiarities of the proposed models, we tested them on several synthetic network topologies, thus underlying when/how they affect the stable states reached by the performed simulations
CDlib: A python library to extract, compare and evaluate communities from complex networks
No full textConformity: a Path-Aware Homophily measure for Node-Attributed Networks
Full text linkUnveil the homophilic/heterophilic behaviors that characterize the wiring patterns of complex networks is an important task in social network analysis, often approached studying the assortative mixing of node attributes. Recent works underlined that a global measure to quantify node homophily necessarily provides a partial, often deceiving, picture of the reality. Moving from such literature, in this work, we propose a novel measure, namely Conformity, designed to overcome such limitation by providing a node-centric quantification of assortative mixing patterns. Differently from the measures proposed so far, Conformity is designed to be path-aware, thus allowing for a more detailed evaluation of the impact that nodes at different degrees of separations have on the homophilic embeddedness of a target. Experimental analysis on synthetic and real data allowed us to observe that Conformity can unveil valuable insights from node-attributed graphs
UTLDR: an agent-based framework for modeling infectious diseases and public interventions
No full textDue to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, epidemic modeling is now experiencing a constantly growing interest from researchers of heterogeneous study fields. Indeed, due to such an increased attention, several software libraries and scientific tools have been developed to ease the access to epidemic modeling. However, only a handful of such resources were designed with the aim of providing a simple proxy for the study of the potential effects of public interventions (e.g., lockdown, testing, contact tracing). In this work, we introduce UTLDR, a framework that, overcoming such limitations, allows to generate “what if” epidemic scenarios incorporating several public interventions (and their combinations). UTLDR is designed to be easy to use and capable to leverage information provided by stratified populations of agents (e.g., age, gender, geographical allocation, and mobility patterns...). Moreover, the proposed framework is generic and not tailored for a specific epidemic phenomena: it aims to provide a qualitative support to understanding the effects of restrictions, rather than produce forecasts/explanation of specific data-driven phenomena
Diffusive phenomena in dynamic networks: A data-driven study
No full textEveryday, ideas, information as well as viruses spread over complex social tissues described by our interpersonal relations. So far, the network contexts upon which diffusive phenomena unfold have usually been considered static, composed by a fixed set of nodes and edges. Recent studies describe social networks as rapidly changing topologies. In this work — following a data-driven approach — we compare the behaviors of classical spreading models when used to analyze a given social network whose topological dynamics are observed at different temporal granularities. Our goal is to shed some light on the impacts that the adoption of a static topology has on spreading simulations as well as to provide an alternative formulation of two classical diffusion models
- …
