Directed propaganda in the majority-rule model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Forgerini, Fabricio L., Crokidakis, Nuno, Carvalho, Marcio A. V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Forgerini, Fabricio L.
Crokidakis, Nuno
Carvalho, Marcio A. V.
author_facet Forgerini, Fabricio L.
Crokidakis, Nuno
Carvalho, Marcio A. V.
contents Advertisement and propaganda have changed continuously in the past decades, mainly due to the people's interactions at online platforms and social networks, and operate nowadays reaching a highly specific online audience instead targeting the masses. The impacts of this new media effect, oriented directly for a specific audience, is investigated on this study, in which we focus on the opinion evolution of agents in the majority-rule model, considering the presence of directed propaganda. We introduce $p$ as the probability of a "positive" external propaganda and $q$ as the probability to the agents follow the external propaganda. Our results show that the usual majority-rule model stationary state is reached, with a full consensus, only for two cases, namely when the external propaganda is absent or when the media favors only one of the two opinions. However, even for a small influence of external propaganda, the final state is reached with a majority opinion dominating the population. For the case in which the propaganda influence is strong enough among the agents, we show that the consensus can not be reached at all, and we observe the polarization of opinions. In addition, we show through analytical and numerical results that the system undergoes an order-disorder phase transition that occurs at $q_c = 1/3$ for the case $p = 0.5$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_13026
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Directed propaganda in the majority-rule model
Forgerini, Fabricio L.
Crokidakis, Nuno
Carvalho, Marcio A. V.
Physics and Society
Statistical Mechanics
Advertisement and propaganda have changed continuously in the past decades, mainly due to the people's interactions at online platforms and social networks, and operate nowadays reaching a highly specific online audience instead targeting the masses. The impacts of this new media effect, oriented directly for a specific audience, is investigated on this study, in which we focus on the opinion evolution of agents in the majority-rule model, considering the presence of directed propaganda. We introduce $p$ as the probability of a "positive" external propaganda and $q$ as the probability to the agents follow the external propaganda. Our results show that the usual majority-rule model stationary state is reached, with a full consensus, only for two cases, namely when the external propaganda is absent or when the media favors only one of the two opinions. However, even for a small influence of external propaganda, the final state is reached with a majority opinion dominating the population. For the case in which the propaganda influence is strong enough among the agents, we show that the consensus can not be reached at all, and we observe the polarization of opinions. In addition, we show through analytical and numerical results that the system undergoes an order-disorder phase transition that occurs at $q_c = 1/3$ for the case $p = 0.5$.
title Directed propaganda in the majority-rule model
topic Physics and Society
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13026