Do Stubborn Users Always Cause More Polarization and Disagreement? A Mathematical Study
Pages 309 - 317
Abstract
We study how the stubbornness of social network users influences opinion polarization and disagreement. Our work is in the context of the popular Friedkin-Johnson opinion formation model, where users update their opinion as a function of the opinion of their connections and their own innate opinion. Stubbornness then is formulated in terms of the stress a user puts on its innate opinion.
We examine two scenarios: one where all nodes have uniform stubbornness levels (homogeneous) and another where stubbornness varies among nodes (inhomogeneous). In the homogeneous scenario, we prove that as the network's stubbornness factor increases, the polarization and disagreement index grows. In the more general inhomogeneous scenario, our findings surprisingly demonstrate that increasing the stubbornness of some users (particularly, neutral/unbiased users) can reduce the polarization and disagreement. We characterize specific conditions under which this phenomenon occurs. Finally, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on real-world network data to corroborate and complement our theoretical findings.
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- Do Stubborn Users Always Cause More Polarization and Disagreement? A Mathematical Study
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Published In
March 2025
1151 pages
ISBN:9798400713293
DOI:10.1145/3701551
- General Chairs:
- Wolfgang Nejdl,
- Sören Auer,
- Proceedings Chair:
- Oliver Karras,
- Program Chairs:
- Meeyoung Cha,
- Marie-Francine Moens,
- Marc Najork
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 10 March 2025
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WSDM '25: The Eighteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
March 10 - 14, 2025
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