Modelling opinion misperception and the emergence of silence in online social system

TL;DR

This paper investigates how social media community structures and influential agents contribute to opinion misperception and silence, revealing that a few charismatic individuals can distort perceived opinion distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation-based analysis showing the role of network topology and influential agents in opinion misperception and silence emergence in online social systems.

Findings

Network structure influences opinion perception distortions.

Charismatic agents induce a spiral of silence among users.

Minority opinions appear more prevalent due to silence dynamics.

Abstract

In the last decades an increasing deal of research has investigated the phenomenon of opinion misperception in human communities and, more recently, in social media. Opinion misperception is the wrong evaluation by community's members of the real distribution of opinions or beliefs about a given topic. In this work we explore the mechanisms giving rise to opinion misperception in social media groups, which are larger than physical ones and have peculiar topological features. By means of numerical simulations, we suggest that the structure of connections of such communities plays indeed a role in distorting the perception of the agents about others' beliefs, but it is essentially an indirect effect. Moreover, we show that the main ingredient that generates the misperception is a spiral of silence induced by few, well connected and charismatic agents, which rapidly drives the majority of individuals to stay silent without disclosing their true belief, leading minoritarian opinions to appear more widespread throughout the community.