Towards control of opinion diversity by introducing zealots into a polarised social group

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to control opinion diversity in polarized social groups by strategically introducing zealots, using a mathematical model to predict and influence the group's average opinion.

Contribution

It provides a closed-form expression for the equilibrium opinion and a strategy to inject zealots to steer opinions, accounting for potential backfire effects.

Findings

Closed-form expression for average opinion at equilibrium

Strategy for zealot injection to shift opinions

Numerical validation on synthetic data

Abstract

We explore a method to influence or even control the diversity of opinions within a polarised social group. We leverage the voter model in which users hold binary opinions and repeatedly update their beliefs based on others they connect with. Stubborn agents who never change their minds ("zealots") are also disseminated through the network, which is modelled by a connected graph. Building on earlier results, we provide a closed-form expression for the average opinion of the group at equilibrium. This leads us to a strategy to inject zealots into a polarised network in order to shift the average opinion towards any target value. We account for the possible presence of a backfire effect, which may lead the group to react negatively and reinforce its level of polarisation in response. Our results are supported by numerical experiments on synthetic data.