I’m very pleased to announce that the work on social media dynamics mentioned in Rage is now in an article in the prestigious Nature journal Scientific Reports. The paper is entitled A Minimalistic Model of Bias, Polarization and Misinformation in Social Networks, and it shows how polarization is a natural dynamic of the social media through which we get much of our news today. And, of course, that dynamic can be manipulated by algorithms.
The papers authors are Orowa Sikder, myself, Pierpaulo Vivo, and Giacomo Livan. Giacomo penned a really good Twitter thread on the paper, the beginning of which I’m including below. It was a great team, and I’m really glad to have been a part of developing such interesting (and I hope impactful) work.
1/Latest one out on @SciReports, done in collaboration with @OrowaSikder @PierpaoloVivo @DrRESmith. We solve a minimalistic social learning model to study the large-scale impact of confirmation bias on the diffusion of (mis)information in social networks. https://t.co/kV2RGnyWuJ pic.twitter.com/OqLu0zU6Qa
— Giacomo Livan (@giacomolivan) March 26, 2020