Abstract
Social media represent an important source of news for many users. They are, however, affected by misinformation and they might be playing a role in the growth of political polarization. In this paper, we create an agent based model to investigate how policing content and backlash on social media (i.e. conflict) can lead to an increase in polarization for both users and news sources. Our model is an advancement over previously proposed models because it allows us to study the polarization of both users and news sources, the evolution of the audience connections between users and sources, and it makes more realistic assumptions about the starting conditions of the system. We find that the tendency of users and sources to avoid policing, backlash and conflict in general can increase polarization online. Specifically polarization comes from the ease of sharing political posts, intolerance for opposing points of view causing backlash and policing, and volatility in changing one's opinion when faced with new information. On the other hand, it seems that the integrity of a news source in trying to resist the backlash and policing has little effect.
Highlights
Many people use social media as their primary channel for news consumption [1]
While this is not modelled after any real-world online social network it has characteristics that can be founded on many online platforms and it can be used to simulate the underlying social dynamics that involve both users and news-sources
In all the subsequent sections we show three things: the distributions of the source and user polarity; and the social network resulting from the rewiring
Summary
Many people use social media as their primary channel for news consumption [1]. there is a growing concerns about information quality and truthfulness to be found there [2,3,4]. Different models of social influence and network evolution (e.g. unfriending, rewiring) are developed to observe under which values polarized communities emerge Within this vast body of research our main point of reference is the post transmission-distribution model [20]. The integrity of news sources, i.e. how much they stick to their own polarization rather than avoiding backlash, plays a negligible role in increasing or decreasing polarization Both users and sources in our model try to minimize conflict, by changing their opinions towards the ones minimizing backlash and/or removing relationships to friends/ news agencies that are too far to be reconciled. This conflict avoidance often results in a polarized environment. The archive containing the data and code necessary for the replication of our results can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/rldphdm8w6letox/20211020_flagging_code.zip?dl=0
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