Effect of Social Media on Opinion Formation

TL;DR

This study models how social media influences opinion formation using an extended Sznajd model, revealing that increased social media influence can suppress phase transitions and lead to consensus or dictatorship in populations.

Contribution

It introduces an external field into the Sznajd model to quantify social media's impact on opinion dynamics, highlighting how influence probability affects system behavior.

Findings

Relaxation time follows a power law with system size, depending on influence probability P.

Higher P reduces phase transition likelihood, leading to consensus.

At P ~ 0.18, the system always reaches a dictatorship state.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the effect of social media on the process of opinion formation in a human population. This effect is modeled as an external field in the dynamics of the two-dimensional Sznajd model with a probability P for an agent to follow the social media. We investigate the evolution of magnetization, the distribution of decision time and the average relaxation time in the presence of the external field. Our results suggest that the average relaxation time on the lattice of size L follows a power law, where the exponent depends on the probability P. We also show that phase transition between two distinct states of the system decreases for any initial distribution of the opinions as the probability P is increasing. For a critical point of P ~ 0.18, no phase transition is observed and the system evolves to a dictatorship regardless of the initial distribution of the opinions in the population.