Echoes of Disagreement: Measuring Disparity in Social Consensus

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Papachristou, Marios, Kleinberg, Jon
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Papachristou, Marios
Kleinberg, Jon
author_facet Papachristou, Marios
Kleinberg, Jon
contents Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of interest corresponds to measuring the influence of each group on the consensus and the disparity between groups on the extent to which they influence the consensus. In this paper, we study and give provable algorithms for optimizing the disparity under the DeGroot or the Friedkin-Johnsen models of opinion dynamics. Our findings provide simple poly-time algorithms to optimize disparity for most cases, fully characterize the instances that optimize disparity, and show how simple interventions such as contracting vertices or adding links affect disparity. Finally, we test our developed algorithms in a variety of real-world datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07480
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Echoes of Disagreement: Measuring Disparity in Social Consensus
Papachristou, Marios
Kleinberg, Jon
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of interest corresponds to measuring the influence of each group on the consensus and the disparity between groups on the extent to which they influence the consensus. In this paper, we study and give provable algorithms for optimizing the disparity under the DeGroot or the Friedkin-Johnsen models of opinion dynamics. Our findings provide simple poly-time algorithms to optimize disparity for most cases, fully characterize the instances that optimize disparity, and show how simple interventions such as contracting vertices or adding links affect disparity. Finally, we test our developed algorithms in a variety of real-world datasets.
title Echoes of Disagreement: Measuring Disparity in Social Consensus
topic Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07480